Caixin News Agency, January 12th (Reporter Sun Yu) Recently, the second instance verdict of Sina Weibo's lawsuit against Today's Headlines for unfair competition dispute has been announced.
According to Zhichanku, on January 11, 2024, the second instance judgment of Sina Weibo v. Today's Headlines Data Transplantation Unfair Competition Case (2021) Jing 73 Min Zhong 2816 was announced, and the Beijing Intellectual Property Court upheld the first instance judgment of over 21 million yuan in compensation.
The involved companies are respectively: Beijing Tiktok Information Service Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tiktok Company", renamed from Beijing ByteDance in May 2022) and Beijing Weimengchuangke Network Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Weimeng Company"). Among them, Weimeng Company is the operator of Sina Weibo.
In the second instance, Tiktok was awarded more than 20 million yuan as compensation for Weibo
Recently, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court made a final judgment on the case of unfair competition dispute between Tiktok Company and the respondent Weimeng Company: rejected the appeal request of Tiktok Company. Tiktok Company compensated Weimeng Company with 20 million yuan of economic losses and 1156700 yuan of reasonable expenses.
The civil judgment made by the People's Court of Haidian District of Beijing on May 17, 2021, with the case number of (2017) Jing 0108 Min Chu No. 24530, shows that the plaintiff is Weimeng Company (the operator of Sina Weibo), and the defendant is Tiktok Company. The two parties are in court due to unfair competition disputes. The court of first instance ruled that Tiktok Company was found to constitute unfair competition and was awarded a compensation of 20 million yuan.
The court held that Tiktok Company, without the permission of Weimeng Company, made alternative or homogeneous commercial use of the Sina Weibo content involved in the case by crawling it and directly "transplanting" it to today's headline platform, which obviously violated the principle of good faith and business ethics, not only damaged the legitimate rights and interests of Weimeng Company, but also disrupted the market competition order and damaged the interests of consumers, Has constituted unfair competition behavior regulated by Article 2 of the Anti Unfair Competition Law of 2019.
Cui Chunhua, a partner of Beijing Dehe Heng Law Firm, stated in an interview with Caixin that the ruling is a typical case of data rights protection in the digital economy era. In this case, the court ruled to confirm that Weimeng Company established and maintained the Sina Weibo platform. The content of the Weibo account in question has formed a data set independent of the original data value of individual users, and Weimeng Company enjoys competitive interests over it. The accused behavior, without the permission of Weimeng Company, crawled Sina Weibo content and directly transplanted it to "Today's Headlines", causing damage to the legitimate rights and interests of Weimeng Company and constituting unfair competition.
What are the references for media organizations? Lawyer Cui Chunhua said, "When operating media institutions, they should fully respect the labor and rights that other media and platform operators have already put in when processing, operating, and managing relevant data and content. They should try to operate through legal and compliant methods such as independent innovation or obtaining legal authorization from relevant entities to avoid infringing on the legitimate rights and interests of other entities, leading to litigation and other risks."
A large amount of "moving" Sina Weibo content on Today's Headlines
Sina Weibo sued Toutiao today, saying that since October 2016, ByteDance has used technical means to capture, or its employees have manually copied, the content from Sina Weibo on a large scale, and then released and displayed in Toutiao today to spread to users.
Sina Weibo believes that ByteDance's "copying and moving" behavior has reduced Sina Weibo's reputation and user stickiness, constituting a substantial replacement for Sina Weibo; Maliciously snatching users and traffic from the Sina Weibo platform in a free riding and effortless manner, thus achieving rapid development in today's headline related sectors in the short term.
ByteDance believed that it did not harm the relevant interests of Sina Weibo. ByteDance argued that the content producer (user) should have independent and complete rights to the published content, including licensing others to use it, and the user has issued a letter of authorization, authorizing Byte Company to synchronize its content published on Sina Weibo on today's headlines, so the content synchronization behavior of Byte Company has a right basis.
The court has determined that the Weibo content displayed and broadcasted through the Sina Weibo platform is not solely generated by users, but rather the final result formed by adding the operational resources and services invested by Weimeng Company on this basis. Essentially, it is a competitive right.
On May 27, 2021, the court issued a civil judgment. The verdict shows that ByteDance has transplanted the content of Sina Weibo on a large scale through a similar "copy and paste" method, and targeted the content of Sina Weibo to today's headlines, which constitutes unfair competition.
According to the judgment, since the effective date of the judgment (May 17), the defendant ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd. immediately stopped "copying and moving" and other unfair competitive behaviors. At the same time, ByteDance needs to publish a statement on the home page of Toutiao.com and the top position of "Toutiao Today" of its official microblog account for seven consecutive days to eliminate the influence of the plaintiff Sina Weibo on the unfair competition behavior involved in the case. In addition, within ten days from the effective date of the judgment, ByteDance needs to compensate Sina Weibo for economic losses of 20 million yuan and reasonable expenses of 1.157 million yuan according to law.
Tiktok was sentenced to pay Tencent more than 32 million yuan
The Whale Platform found that this was not the first time that Tiktok Group was fined. Previously, it had been sentenced to pay Tencent more than 32 million yuan for infringement of clips.
Tencent found that after the independent broadcast of "Yunnan Worm Valley" on August 30, 2021, there were a large number of clips of the play uploaded by users on Tiktok.
On September 22, 2021, Tencent filed a lawsuit with the Xi'an Intermediate People's Court, requiring Tiktok to immediately take effective measures to delete, filter and intercept relevant videos, and compensate economic losses and reasonable expenses of 10 million yuan.
Tiktok said that the relevant videos were uploaded by users themselves, and there were a large number of users on the platform, so Tiktok could not conduct substantive review of massive information; In addition, according to the law, the Tiktok platform only provides information network storage services, without the obligation of content review. The platform has reminded users not to infringe upon the intellectual property rights of others when uploading content, and has fulfilled the obligation to notify deletion, so it does not constitute infringement.
"Yunnan Insect Valley" is a suspenseful adventure web drama produced by Penguin Film and Television, a subsidiary of Tencent. It is adapted from the popular novel "Yunnan Insect Valley: Ghost Blows the Lamp" and consists of 16 episodes.
On October 26, 2022, the Intermediate People's Court of Xi'an City made a first instance judgment on the case of Yunnan Insect Valley. The court held that Tiktok should bear corresponding management obligations for infringement of platform content. A large number of users on Tiktok's platform have infringed on the works involved. Although Tiktok has taken measures to reduce the number of infringing works, the infringement has not been effectively curbed.
The court held that Tiktok belongs to helping infringement, and should immediately take effective measures to delete, filter and intercept relevant videos, and compensate Tencent for economic losses and reasonable expenses of more than 32.4 million yuan.
Jiang Li, a lawyer from Zhejiang Jindao Law Firm, said in an interview with the media that from the public information on the Internet, Tiktok has deleted some of the suspected infringing works, but in terms of quantity, there is still a considerable number of suspected infringing works that have not been deleted. Therefore, Tiktok based on whether the platform content management party has taken reasonable and effective measures to delete, filter Interception of suspected infringing videos becomes the key to determining whether they constitute infringement. But whether it is necessary to consider whether the platform can fully distinguish one by one in terms of technology, and whether such measures are obligations imposed on the platform by law, these issues need to be finally judged by the second instance court.
Lawyer Jiang Li believes that platforms providing short video services cannot simply apply the safe harbor principle on the grounds that network service providers fulfill their "notification deletion" duty of care. It is necessary to distinguish between different situations such as the popularity of works and the rationality of measures taken. The balance between rights holders and the public interest needs further institutional clarification.
In this case, the Xi'an Intermediate People's Court broke the national record for similar cases with a total amount exceeding 32 million yuan and a standard of 2 million yuan per episode.