In April 2022, the results of the "Top 10 Most Valuable IPR Cases to Study in China in 2021" organized by the Shanghai Intellectual Property Institute were announced. The "WeChat Data Crawler Unfair Competition Case" represented by James Wang and Mark Zhang, partners from dispute resolution team of Llinks on behalf of a client in Hangzhou Internet Court (Hangzhou Railway Court) was selected as one of the top ten cases.
The typical significance of this case mainly lies in two points. First, this case confirms once again that platform enterprises enjoy competitive rights over the overall data resources accumulated on the platforms, and they should be protected by the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. This will help motivate platform enterprises to continuously increase investment in building up high-quality content platforms, promote the sustainable development of the content industry in a long term and satisfy the demand of consumers for high-quality content. Second, in the context of the long-running debate over the legitimacy of robots.txt, this case also provides a reference for balancing the "protection of website operators' right to operate independently" and the "promotion of the free flow of information on the Internet" from the perspective of judicial practice.
