§ LAW · AUCL

Anti-Unfair Competition Law of the People's Republic of China.

中华人民共和国反不正当竞争法

DCC catalogue entry — summary, not full text.

Why this law matters for the data field

The Anti-Unfair Competition Law (反不正当竞争法, “AUCL”) is China’s general statute against unfair market conduct, enforced administratively by SAMR (市场监管总局) and litigated privately in the courts. For most of its history it had nothing specific to say about data — so Chinese courts policed data scraping and data free-riding through Article 2, the open-textured good-faith / business-ethics general clause. That is the basis on which the headline data cases of the past few years were decided, including Datatang v. Yinmu and the AI-ghostwritten “seeding post” case.

The third revision, adopted 27 June 2025 and effective 15 October 2025, changed that by adding a purpose-built data clause.

The data clause — Article 13

Article 13 prohibits an operator (经营者) from using fraud, coercion, circumventing or breaking technical management measures, or other improper means to acquire or use data lawfully held by another operator (其他经营者合法持有的数据) in a way that harms that operator’s lawful rights and interests and disrupts the order of market competition. The revision also:

reads “technical management measures” broadly — covering data, algorithms, technology, platform rules, and the like; and
adds related provisions on abuse of platform rules (instructing or carrying out fake transactions, fake reviews, malicious returns, etc.).

How the courts are reading it

The first published application is the Beijing Internet Court’s 30 April 2026 judgment holding that scraping and reselling a career-networking platform’s user data is unfair competition — see DCC’s brief, China’s First Ruling Under the New AUCL “Data Clause”. That judgment supplies the working test counsel should track:

a four-element framework — object (data lawfully held by another operator), subject (the actor is an operator), conduct (improper acquisition/use), result (harm to the other operator + disruption of market-competition order); and
a definition of “data lawfully held” — a dataset lawfully collected, stored or used, formed through the operator’s substantial investment, and capable of bringing it business benefit or competitive advantage.

Notably, the analysis is conduct- and investment-focused rather than turning on whether a statutory data property right exists, and it de-emphasises the old “competitive relationship” requirement — both moves that widen the clause’s reach.

Briefs on this law

DCC briefs that turn on the AUCL are linked from this page’s “Briefs on this law” section (any post whose laws: references this entry).

§ RELATED LAWS

Briefs on this law.

5 briefs reference this law.

§ 01 · E-COMMERCE-LAW

China's 2026 Draft E-Commerce Law Amendment: From Marketplace Transactions to Platform-Economy Governance

On July 4, 2026, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Ministry of Commerce released the Draft Amendment to the E-Commerce Law for public comment, with comments due August 4, 2026. The draft has 20 articles and, according to the official notice and Xinhua Q&A, moves in five directions: expanding the law's adjustment scope beyond platforms and in-platform operators to other platform-economy participants; strengthening the platform responsibility system with richer, more graduated regulatory tools; building an integrated supervision mechanism for cross-sector platform operations, including consistent online/offline business supervision and stronger department and central-local coordination; targeting prominent illegal conduct in e-commerce; and deepening open cooperation by aligning rules, regulation, management and standards with international practice, supporting industry self-discipline and orderly outbound expansion, and adding countermeasure tools to protect Chinese enterprises. DCC reads the amendment as an attempt to reposition the E-Commerce Law from a transaction/platform statute into a platform-economy governance statute, with operational implications for platform rulemaking, merchant and worker protection, consumer governance, data/network security clauses, competition compliance, and outbound platform expansion.

4 JUL 2026 e-commerce-law · platform-economy · platform-governance
§ 02 · DATA-ECONOMY

Li Yang: Why 'Data Rights-Confirmation' Is a Category Error — Dynamic Data Can't Be a Registration Object, and AUCL Article 13 Is the Better Path

DCC's summary of an opinion piece by Li Yang (李扬), professor at China University of Political Science and Law, arguing that the whole project of 'data rights-confirmation' (数据确权) — and the data-IP registration pilots run under it — rests on a category error. In Chinese IP law, 'confirmation' (确权) is the authoritative validation of an already-existing right, and it presupposes three things data lacks: a determinate object, defined rights content, and clear boundaries. Civil Code Art. 127 only defers the question; 'data IP' is a policy concept, not a legal one; and data is co-produced by many parties, so registration proves who submitted data, not who owns it. Li Yang's sharpest move is the dynamic-object problem: registration regimes (real estate, IP, equity) require a persistently stable object, but data's value lives in continuous updating, so the data at registration is never the data in dispute — and blockchain/hash/timestamp '存证' only fix a historical snapshot, never the living data stream, confusing proof-of-existence with object-identification. He concludes that registration's real functions are evidentiary and publicity/transaction-support — not rights-confirmation — and that data governance should move from rights-confirmation to interest-protection, from static-rights thinking to dynamic-competition thinking, protecting commercial-data interests under Article 13 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. DCC's read for overseas counsel, against the data-IP registration regime and the Beijing Internet Court's first AUCL Article 13 ruling.

24 JUN 2026 data-economy · data-property-rights · data-registration
§ 03 · ANTI-UNFAIR-COMPETITION

How the Beijing Internet Court Found a Platform 'Lawfully Held' Its Data Under the New AUCL Article 13 — and Where It Meets the 'Right to Hold Data'

The Beijing Internet Court's 30 April 2026 judgment — the first published application of the data clause (Article 13) of the 2025-revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law, effective 15 October 2025 — turns on one threshold question: did the plaintiff platform 'lawfully hold' (合法持有) the scraped career data? DCC walks through exactly how the court got to 'yes', step by step: the data originated as personal information collected with user consent under the platform's Service Agreement and Privacy Policy (no unlawful processing on record); the operator's build-and-run investment aggregated scattered records into a dataset with standalone economic value; and that dataset is the foundational input for the platform's matching business and competitive advantage. From those three findings the court derives its operative definition — data lawfully collected/stored/used, formed through substantial investment, and capable of generating business benefit or competitive advantage — and holds that the defendant's crawler-and-resale scheme, circumventing login and access controls, was unfair competition (¥200,000 + ¥30,000-plus in costs). The brief then takes up the doctrinal question: does Article 13's 'lawfully held data' correspond to the 'right to hold data' (数据持有权) in the Data 20 Articles' three-rights framework? The answer is a functional yes — the court is enforcing the holding right's purely defensive content, exactly as Hong Yanqing's analysis predicted AUCL Article 13 would — but not a doctrinal one: it builds a competition-tort interest on investment and lawful sourcing, deliberately sidestepping any claim that data is a typed property right. DCC's case brief for overseas counsel, drawn against the earlier AUCL Article 2 general-clause data cases.

24 JUN 2026 anti-unfair-competition · data-economy · data-property-rights
§ 04 · AI-GOVERNANCE

China's First AI-Ghostwritten 'Seeding Post' Case — a Duty of Care for Generative-AI Providers

China's first unfair-competition case over AI batch-ghostwritten 'seeding posts' (种草笔记 — the staged, first-person product-recommendation notes that drive discovery commerce on Xiaohongshu/RED). On appeal, the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court ((2025) Zhe 01 Min Zhong No. 3998) held that the operators of an 'AI writing' tool ('AI写作鹅') that let users one-click-generate fake first-person Xiaohongshu notes — fabricating personal experiences and feelings — committed unfair competition under Article 2 (the general clause) of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. The court built an explicit four-factor duty-of-care test for generative-AI providers (is it generative AI; does it target a specific scenario/another's product as its 'application layer'; is it directional and inducing; is it a paid, for-profit service), citing Articles 4(3), 5(1) and 22 of the Generative AI Services Interim Measures. Because the tool was named after Xiaohongshu, marketed to mass-produce on-brand 'seeding' copy, charged a membership fee, and shipped with no notice or reminder against the foreseeable misuse, the providers were at fault. The appeal court affirmed liability but cut damages from RMB 200,000 to RMB 100,000 on an 'inclusive and prudent' (包容审慎) view of AI, and reversed joint liability for the third defendant that merely hosted the download. DCC OCR'd the full judgment from the source images; this is our case brief for overseas counsel.

Updated · 8 JUN 2026 ai-governance · generative-ai · unfair-competition
§ 05 · JUDICIAL

Datatang v. Yinmu — China's First Ruling on a Data-IP Registration Certificate, and Why Open-Sourced Data Is Still Protected

A consolidated case study of 数据堂诉隐木科技 (Datatang v. Yinmu) — the Beijing IP Court's June 2024 appeal ruling, widely called China's first case on the evidentiary effect of a data-IP registration certificate. The dispute: Datatang built voice datasets for AI training, open-sourced some under a license; Yinmu took and redistributed them in the same data-services market. DCC synthesizes four commentaries (the case report, a Tsinghua analysis, and two Shenzhen Data Exchange DEXC+ deep-dives) into the four holdings that matter for overseas counsel: (1) a data-IP registration certificate is prima facie evidence of property-type interests and lawful sourcing — but not an absolute property right (property-rights-statutism); (2) open-sourced data, though neither trade secret nor copyrightable compilation, is protectable under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law's general clause; (3) the protection hierarchy (compilation work → trade secret → AUCL Art. 2); and (4) whether the taker honored the open-source license is the hinge for 'improper conduct.'

29 MAY 2026 judicial · data-property-rights · data-registration

Anti-Unfair Competition Law of the People's Republic of China.

Why this law matters for the data field

The data clause — Article 13

How the courts are reading it

Briefs on this law

China's 2026 Draft E-Commerce Law Amendment: From Marketplace Transactions to Platform-Economy Governance

Li Yang: Why 'Data Rights-Confirmation' Is a Category Error — Dynamic Data Can't Be a Registration Object, and AUCL Article 13 Is the Better Path

How the Beijing Internet Court Found a Platform 'Lawfully Held' Its Data Under the New AUCL Article 13 — and Where It Meets the 'Right to Hold Data'

China's First AI-Ghostwritten 'Seeding Post' Case — a Duty of Care for Generative-AI Providers

Datatang v. Yinmu — China's First Ruling on a Data-IP Registration Certificate, and Why Open-Sourced Data Is Still Protected