Filed under civil-code
Every brief tagged "civil-code".
- § 01 · AI-AGENTS
Fault for Services, Strict Liability Only for Machines: Wang Liming on Tort Liability When AI Agents Cause Harm
In Tsinghua University Law Journal (《清华法学》) 2026 No. 5, Wang Liming (王利明) of Renmin University sets out how Chinese tort law should handle harm done by AI agents. His answers: an agent is never a liable party, so liability falls on the people along its value chain; AI that provides a service, such as generative AI, is judged by fault, while strict product liability applies only to agents that enter the physical world as tangible things and threaten life, body, health or tangible property; where fault applies, operators and deployers should prove they took reasonable care; multiple actors are not jointly and severally liable by default, but answer in proportion to their causal contribution, with the party closest to the end user carrying the heaviest risk-control duty; open-source and free providers get lighter treatment; causation should be presumed when the evidence sits with the defendant; and the 'mass micro-torts' agents produce, such as leaks of many people's personal information, call for representative and public-interest litigation rather than individual suits. DCC summarizes the article section by section and maps each proposal against the Supreme People's Court's AI Disputes Opinions (法发〔2026〕10号), the PIPL and the Civil Code. Most of Wang's framework is already in the Opinions; the reversal of the burden of proof for service agents, the presumption of causation, and substitute measures for data-subject rights go further.
- § 02 · GENERATIVE-AI
Which of the Ten Duties Actually Bites: Cheng Xiao on Fault and Statutory Duty for Generative-AI Providers
In a Political Science and Law Tribune article, Tsinghua professor Cheng Xiao (程啸) resets how Chinese courts should reason from a generative-AI provider's statutory duties to civil fault. His thesis: tort liability here is fault-based under Civil Code Art. 1165(1); 'duty of care' is not a separate element but the objective reasonable-person standard in AI dress. Crucially, not every breach of a statutory duty is fault. Negative duties (do not infringe) collapse into the 'infringement of rights' element and prove nothing about fault; only breach of an affirmative statutory duty can ground fault — and only where the duty aims to protect individuals, the plaintiff is within its protected class, and the harmed interest is within its protected scope. Applying that filter to the ten affirmative duties in the Generative AI Interim Measures, Cheng sorts them into result-based and method-based obligations, sets out five factors for judging the method-based ones, and criticizes two court rulings that grounded fault on a labeling or risk-warning duty in copyright cases the duty was never meant to protect against.
- § 03 · DATA-PLEDGE-FINANCING
Data Pledge Financing in China: What Is Actually Being Pledged, and Where the Law Gets Stuck
As Chinese banks and data exchanges experiment with data pledge financing (数据质押融资), a threshold question remains unresolved: what, legally, is being pledged? Chen Yiqian of Shenzhen Data Exchange walks through the two available routes under the Civil Code — chattel pledge (动产质权) and rights pledge (权利质权) — and the three operational problems that make chattel pledge difficult and the two doctrinal barriers that make rights pledge harder still. The analysis converges on a practical conclusion: chattel pledge via a third-party data custodian is the most workable path today, while data property rights and data intellectual-property rights both remain insufficiently legalised to support a reliable pledge. For overseas counsel advising on China data-asset financing, the gap between policy ambition and legal infrastructure is the central risk to price. Connects to the broader data property-rights registration project and the unresolved question of how data enters corporate balance sheets.