RMB 20 million damages awarded against unauthorised scraping of public social media data

The summary from the 126 page judgment below is written partly using Chat GPT 4.0.

The case between Weimeng Company (aka MicroDream Company) and Jianyixun Company (aka iDataApp), which concluded with the final judgment by the Guangdong Higher People's Court, is a landmark in the field of data rights and unfair competition in China. RMB 20 million damages is awarded against the illegal scraping on the basis of the market price for resale of the amount of data going at RMB 1/ 100 requests.

In this case, Weimeng, the operator of the Sina Weibo platform, accused Jianyixun of unauthorised use of Weibo's server API to transmit data to the user end. Jianyixun obtained a large amount of Weibo backend data through this method and then stored and resold this data through its iDataAPI website. The court found that Jianyixun's actions constituted unfair competition, as they had repeatedly changed IP addresses and Weibo user accounts to request data from Weibo servers, thereby obtaining data they had no right to access and using it for profit. This was deemed a violation of fair and honest competition principles and commercial ethics, disrupting the data market's competitive order and severely harming the legal rights of both Weimeng Company and consumers.

The court supported Weimeng Company's claim for compensation of economic losses amounting to 20 million RMB, considering factors such as the types of unfair competition conducted by Jianyixun, the use of malicious technical methods, the long duration of these activities, the large scale of Weibo data called, and the serious consequences of these actions. Additionally, the court acknowledged that while Weimeng legally held the Weibo data, it did not have absolute exclusive rights to this data. The judgment aimed to balance the protection of data rights with the orderly circulation of data, a principle that is increasingly significant in the digital economy era.

Rather than copyright, unfair competition laws is the prevailing cause of action used against illegal web scraping activities in China. Previous cases include Dianping v Aibang (2010) Hai Min Chu Zhi No. 4253, and Hantao v. Baidu (2016) 沪73民终No.242. Liabilities under cyber security laws, breach of contract (website T&C), or even criminal laws can be attached if the scraping leads to loss suffered by the website, constitutes unreasonable use of the website, or constitutes bypassing and attacking the network's anti-circumvention setup.

It is also interesting that the second and third paragraphs of the case summary bear close resemblance to numerous articles online which admittedly all look similar, but without citation given in the answer. Is this yet another instance after New York Times v. ChatGPT showing that the output problem has not yet been fully resolved? Further, the fair use argument might not work here as the unfair competition laws require more - just asking websites to incorporate an opt-out script is not enough.

Could this astonishing ability to aggregate and analyze judgments also one of the reasons now Chinese judgments are much down selected for publication and heavily redacted?