On 4 Aug. 2022, the “Trial Information of Being Courts” (bjcourt.gov.cn) released the civil judgment of a dispute between MOOC-CN Information Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. (北京慕華信息科技有限公司, hereinafter the “plaintiff”) and Shanghai Kuanyu Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (上海寬娛數碼科技有限公司, hereinafter the “defendant”), where the defendant was alleged to infringe on the plaintiff’s right to information network dissemination.
The defendant is the operator of Bilibili, China’s fourth largest video-sharing platform.
In the case, the plaintiff claimed that it had the exclusive network dissemination right of the course “Financial Analysis and Decision Making” taught by Professor Xiao Xing of Tsinghua University, and thus accused the defendant of abetting and aiding infringement on the grounds that Bilibili had provided the pirated videos to its users for a long time, failing to perform its duty by deleting or blocking those videos.
According to Article 1169 of China’s Civil Code, those who abet or aid others to commit acts of infringement shall assume joint and several liability with the perpetrator.
In the court’s view, the defendant had failed to perform its duty of reasonable care to users’ infringing uploads while allowing the videos to be disseminated and recommended, which had constituted an act of abetting and aiding infringement and violated the plaintiff’s right to information network dissemination of the videos involved. After the trial, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, requiring the defendant to compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses of over CNY 440,000.
Cover Photo by Lin Zhang on Unsplash
Contributors: CJO Staff Contributors Team
