In November 2021, the judgement of the Case of Illegal Scraping of Data on WeChat Official Account Platform represented by James Wang and Mark Zhang, partners from dispute resolution team of Llinks on behalf of Tencent, was pronounced. The court ruled that the accused acts constituted unfair competition and ordered the defendant to cease the infringement and compensate the plaintiff Tencent for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling CNY600,000.
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.
