[ad_1]
China has launched an Internet court in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. The court will use blockchain technology to combat plagiarism for online writers. The purpose of the court is to save time and reduce the overhead costs for seeking justice for Internet-related disputes. So far, China has set up three Internet courts in Beijing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou to handle Internet-related cases.
At the time of the launch, the court would have to accept requests for judicial deposit and cases by electronic means. The court has been assigned the mandate to govern cases online via live streaming. To use the court, an actor will have to verify his identity with a government issued ID or an Alipay account.
The new court aims to help resolve disputes in the online community. According to reports, in the Binjiang district of the city, which has been dubbed a "village of writers", there are over one hundred online writers currently under contract. These writers have reported having had problems with piracy over the years. However, it has become increasingly difficult for writers who have tried to prove their ownership of any work done online. Most of these writers are responsible for downloading content and screenshots as proof of ownership. These "test" methods can easily be falsified, rendering them ineffective as evidence.
To help solve these problems, the Hangzhou Internet Court decided to use the distributed ledger to solve problems. The court believes it will be impossible to interfere with the evidence recorded in the technology because of its decentralized nature. Moreover, the technology will help to trace authoriality, content, creation time and plagiarism.
The Internet court became the first court in the country to recognize blockchain technology as a means of preserving evidence. A recently concluded case strongly influenced this decision. The case concerned a company based in Hangzhou that sued a technology company based in Shenzhen to make publications of copyrighted material of the plaintiff on its official website.
The plaintiff took a snapshot of the technology company's web page, including the source code, and uploaded it to a blockchain. After the investigations were completed, the Internet court claimed that this form of electronic data would now be used as evidence in copyright infringement cases.
Before creating an Internet court in Hangzhou, the Zhejiang High Court launched a pilot program that created an online court system in Zhejiang. The system was supposed to handle the growing workload in Hangzhou. Among the courts that joined the system were three trial courts in Hangzhou and the Intermediate Court in Hangzhou.
