Filed under platform-competition
Every brief tagged "platform-competition".
- § 01 · ANTI-UNFAIR-COMPETITION
How the Beijing Internet Court Found a Platform 'Lawfully Held' Its Data Under the New AUCL Article 13 — and Where It Meets the 'Right to Hold Data'
The Beijing Internet Court's 30 April 2026 judgment — the first published application of the data clause (Article 13) of the 2025-revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law, effective 15 October 2025 — turns on one threshold question: did the plaintiff platform 'lawfully hold' (合法持有) the scraped career data? DCC walks through exactly how the court got to 'yes', step by step: the data originated as personal information collected with user consent under the platform's Service Agreement and Privacy Policy (no unlawful processing on record); the operator's build-and-run investment aggregated scattered records into a dataset with standalone economic value; and that dataset is the foundational input for the platform's matching business and competitive advantage. From those three findings the court derives its operative definition — data lawfully collected/stored/used, formed through substantial investment, and capable of generating business benefit or competitive advantage — and holds that the defendant's crawler-and-resale scheme, circumventing login and access controls, was unfair competition (¥200,000 + ¥30,000-plus in costs). The brief then takes up the doctrinal question: does Article 13's 'lawfully held data' correspond to the 'right to hold data' (数据持有权) in the Data 20 Articles' three-rights framework? The answer is a functional yes — the court is enforcing the holding right's purely defensive content, exactly as Hong Yanqing's analysis predicted AUCL Article 13 would — but not a doctrinal one: it builds a competition-tort interest on investment and lawful sourcing, deliberately sidestepping any claim that data is a typed property right. DCC's case brief for overseas counsel, drawn against the earlier AUCL Article 2 general-clause data cases.