A launch ceremony for the copyright-Tianping blockchain synergistic governance platform and the demonstrative project of a credible digital copyright ecology was held on Sept 9.

It was co-organized by the Beijing Internet Court, the Beijing copyright protection center and Capital Copyright Industry Alliance. 

The platform is China’s first administration and judiciary synergistic governance mechanism in the copyright field.

Digital copyright certification to digitalize copyright assets

The information on a traditional copyright certificate is limited, hard to transmit and trace, ,easy to falsify, while a digital copyright certificate is able to store huge and complete information including copyright owners, works and related documents and certificates of entitlement, said Xue Feng, director of the Beijing copyright protection center.

The latter uses hash technology and asymmetric cryptographic technique to make certificates credible, high-efficient, tamper-resistant, easy to manage and able to be traced and transferred.

Digitalizing copyright certifications and storing them on blockchain tackles such urgent problems.

Copyright blockchain, trusted digital infrastructure

The copyright blockchain is composed of certificate, rights protection and transaction blockchains which work together to form the trusted digital infrastructure

The certificate blockchain is used to store digital copyright registration certificates and provide trusted services of copyright assets confirmation. The rights protection chain is built to store copyright monitoring data and provide right infringement clues and digital storage evidence. The copyright transaction blockchain is used to release copyright digital assets and store evidences of the copyrights’ transactions.

Tianping blockchain, fixing problems of electronic evidence storage, confirmation and verification

Internet-related cases means that most evidence is electronic and was formed on the internet. The blockchain was built to fix the problems of storing, confirming and verifying evidence.

The Beijing Internet Court was the initiator and leader of Tianping blockchain since it was built in 2019.

The features of blockchain technology such as multi-party supervision, non-tampering, and easy traceability ensure the security of the uplink data and realize the pre-storage and post-verification of electronic data.

Through formulation of related regulations, the court stipulated qualification requirments of the parties access to the blockchain, to specify electronic data storage rules, management mechanisms and use of the data. The regulations also standardize the supervision review and exit mechanism of the units on the blockchain, thushelping to solve authenticity issues of electronic evidence from its origin and preventing improper evidence identification.

So far, evidence in 180,000 cases that submitted through the court’s online litigation platform has been stored on the blockchain.

Copyright-Tianping blockchain synergistic governance platform

To settle copyright disputes with high-efficiency the Beijing Internet Court and the Beijing copyright protection center collaborate the Tianping and copyright blockchains to form the synergistic governance platform.

Zhang Wen, president of the court described the platform at the launch ceremony.

It realizes a consistency between the rules of copyright authentization in ownership registration and the judicial determination and encourages the public to register copyright and to use the blockchain to store evidence, which together constitutes a standard ownership registration system.

Beijing copyright protection center registers works for right holders and stores the digital copyright certificates on its blockchain, with the right holders able to trace the certificate numbers through the chain. If one discovers an infringement, the right holder can file a case at the Beijing Internet Court and submit the number. The court is entitled to use the number to access registration materials through the platform and check them when hearing the case.

The synergistic governance platform, supported by consistent standards, docking technologies and evidence storage, will highly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of work registration and reduce the risks of safeguarding rights, and is also a major measure to build a copyright co-governance system through both strengthened administration and the judiciary, said Zhang.

Cai Huiyong, vice-president of the Beijing High People's Court, said that the platform grasps the deep-rooted problems of cases of the same type in the copyright field and takes comprehensive and from-top-to-bottom measures, which promotes the standardized development of copyright markets and also provides good examples for courts in Beijing to improve the efficiency of trial work and innovate their governance models of dissolving disputes from sources.