China’s highest court has published a draft version of regulations publicly to seek opinions from experts and the public at large. The regulations would hold internet providers of services like cloud storage, search, p2p, and even links potentially responsible if they cooperated with or aided users in infringing upon someone else’s legal rights. In other words, an internet service like a cloud storage site could potentially be held legally responsible for copyright violations if the court found that it was “helping” or “cooperating with” a user who was using its service to perpetrate those violations.
Whether or not this was the case would apparently depend on whether or not the service in question “obviously knew” or “should have known” about the user’s infringing behavior. If, for example, a user is obviously using a service to distribute copyrighted films, the service in question could be held legally responsible for this. The regulations also stipulate requirements for responding to takedown orders from the Court when infringing material is discovered. For popular videos, companies will have one business day for removal; for most other kinds of infringement, the time allowed for takedown will not exceed five days.
This might seem especially dangerous for search engines, but the draft contains specific language stating that generally speaking, the Court would not assume that a search engine was responsible for or aware of rights infringement just because a link appeared in its search results. That’s good news for people who use search engines — i.e., everyone — because without that stipulation the regulations might have required severely curtailed search results.
The draft has also raised a debate about what would constitute rights-infringement on microblogging services. Does simple reposting of a message constitute illegal infringement of someone else’s intellectual property? The Court’s draft does not take an opinion, but it has become a matter for discussion in China’s news media and could be even be included in future drafts of the regulations.
The current draft of the regulations is not final. The “seeking opinions” stage is a typical phase of Chinese lawmaking, and after a period of time set aside for public discussion, the Court will remove the draft from the public and make whatever revisions it deems necessary before eventually releasing the finalized regulations.
[Southern Daily via Sina Tech, Image Source]