How China is Planning to Fight Online Plagiarism

During the last couple of years, China has been dealing with a wide variety of intellectual property issues. Given its 800 million internet users, the problem has further accentuated recently, since the number of disputes involving online businesses has increased exponentially.

In an effort to fight this problem, the Hangzhou Internet
Court has recently announced the implementation of a blockchain-based judicial
system, designed to fight online plagiarism and copyright disagreements.

With this in mind, the system makes it easier for those
involved in disputes to gather evidence to support their claims. As such, work
made available on the internet can be extracted and uploaded onto the
blockchain platform, thus allowing copyright holders to use it as evidence in
court. According to the Xinhua publication, which originally broke the news: “Writers publishing their work online can
easily be hurt by piracy and it is hard to safeguard their legal rights due to
difficulties collecting evidence. But an internet court in east China’s
Hangzhou now has a solution.”

An interesting aspect worth pointing out about the court is
that citizens can submit their cases electronically. Similarly, judges can rule
their decisions via live stream, thus making the process more efficient. In terms of the blockchain-based system used to verify
online plagiarism, the Internet Court mentioned that distributed ledger
technology cannot be tampered with, given its decentralized nature. As such,
the system will efficiently keep track of authorship, when the work was
created, the content itself alongside any evidence of copyright infringement.

In the long run, the system will reduce the amount of
plagiarism found online, while also making it easier for writers to pursue copyright
disputes. Based on this, writers will no longer have to resort to downloading
and screenshotting their online content, to prove ownership. The legal struggle
associated with reporting copyright infringements will be non-existent, since
authors will only need to file an electronic request showcasing their work on
the blockchain, alongside the plagiarized material. According to a judge who
works at the court, “all digital
footprints stored in the judicial blockchain system – authorship, time of
creation, content and evidence of infringement – have legal effect”.

If successful, the system will likely be implemented at China’s other Internet Courts in Beijing and Guangzhou.

Featured Image via BigStock.