CHINESE COURTS AND BLOCKCHAIN EVIDENCE

Recently, Hangzhou’s internet court was the first to recognize blockchain as an authorized evidence in courts. It was in a case where the plaintiff ‘Huatai Yimei’ a Hangzhou based-media company claimed copyright infringement against another Shenzhen-based technological company. In this case, the plaintiff has presented screen-shot evidence of images and texts that have been illegally used by the defendant. It has obtained the evidence from a third-party site called baoquan.com which is a blockchain-based platform. Despite the case being controversial to the court, the court accepted the evidence and ruled in favor of the plaintiff. The court indicated that: “We can’t exclude it just because it’s a complex technology. Nor can we lower the standard just because it is tamper-proof and traceable”.

Blockchain is relatively a new digital platform for all crypto-currency transactions that allow financial transactions and flexibility in owning assets. Once information is inserted to the platform they cannot be deleted, and they are available to everyone at the same time. Therefore, the information available can be verified using blockchain rather than other authorities which means less capital can be situated in checking information and thus lower transaction costs. Moreover, there is an unlikely cause of repeating restored information which results in higher efficiency performance.

The outcome ruling of the case indicated that Chinese courts are prepared to accept blockchain evidence in courts. The court concluded that technological evidence in courts is to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Cases that involve technology have a difficult approach to reach a well-rounded decision as judges may be unfamiliar with the fast-moving technological changes. In this case, it is apparent that Chinese courts are prepared to overcome the struggles that arise with new technological techniques and that they are flexible to move away from the traditional application of the law. [Source: CRYPTOVEST.COM]