In the News: Another Internet Court for China; Blockchain Evidence Now Admissible
September 10, 2018 | BY
Jacelyn JohnsonChina launches its second Internet Court in Beijing to keep in pace with growing internet-related disputes; while the Supreme People's Court just announced the admissibility of evidence using blockchain technology.
China Launches Second Internet Court as Online Disputes Increase
China on Sunday announced the opening of its second Internet Court in Beijing in a bid to cope with increasing online disputes. China is actively taking measures to further enhance protection for online business transactions, personal data information, and intellectual property rights.
The Beijing Internet Court is designed to handle civil cases involving internet-related disputes such as online shopping contract disputes, online loan disputes, copyright infringement lawsuits, domain name disputes, internet defamation, and other administrative lawsuits.
The high-tech court comes equipped with facial recognition and speech recognition technologies, as well as electronic signatures. The system utilizes artificial intelligence-based risk assessment tools and is capable of generating legal documents automatically, uses machine translation and allows voice interactions with its knowledge system. Anyone can participate in an online legal proceeding upon identification verification of facial recognition against the national ID system kept by the public security bureaus.
The Internet court functions as a district-level court. Litigants who are dissatisfied with the verdict may make an appeal to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court for IP-related cases or to the Intermediate People's Court for other cases.
China first introduced Internet Court services in 2017 with the opening of the Hangzhou Internet Court in the Zhejiang province, dubbed as the first ever virtual court in the world. The Hangzhou Internet Court has handled more than 11,000 cases since its inception, and its average duration of a trial is 38 days, which is about 50 percent shorter than conventional courts.
China Greenlights Using Blockchain Technology in Evidence Authentication
Blockchain technology can now be used to authenticate digital evidence should the authenticity of electronic data submitted into court be in dispute, said the Supreme People's Court in its Provisions on Certain Issues in Internet Court Trial Cases, which came into force on Sept. 7.
The provisions were promulgated in an effort to regulate litigation activities of internet courts in order to protect the legitimate rights of the parties and to ensure a fair and efficient trial of cases.
Internet courts will now recognize digital data that are submitted as evidence if relevant parties had collected and stored these data using blockchain technology, and can prove their authenticity through digital signatures, reliable timestamps and hash value verification or via a digital deposition platform. The new regulation means that data in distributed ledger technology will now be admissible in court as legal evidence.
This development though comes after China's first internet court in Hangzhou ruled that evidence which had been authenticated using blockchain technology was admissible. The court, in an online copyright infringement dispute in June this year, held that blockchain technology complied with relevant standards to ensure reliability of electronic data, and if technical verification was consistent and other evidence could be simultaneously verified, such electronic data could be used as evidence for the infringement.
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