| The E-Commerce Law of the People’s Republic of China(hereinafter referred as“the e-commerce law”),effective from January 1,2019,is adopted for protecting the rights and interests of all parties involved in e-commerce,regulating e-commerce behavior,maintaining the market order,and thus promoting the healthy development of e-commerce in China.Meanwhile,it is also the first time to clarify the intellectual property protection duty of an e-commerce platform business through a special law.Article 42-44 of the e-commerce law stipulates the notice-and-take-down rule and the liability of the e-commerce platform;Article 45 sets the “actual knowledge” rule and corresponding liabilities of an e-commerce platform business who knows or should know the intellectual property infringements on its platform.Despite of the obligations they beard,the E-commerce platform business’ pursuit of business interests makes them suspicious of the repeated counterfeiting of goods and other intellectual property infringements on the platform.They prefer to formalize a superficial review system and seek legal loopholes to avoid the joint liability for infringement downward from the e-commerce law.From an empirical analysis,a search of relevant cases after the implementation of the e-commerce law reveals that there are quite a number of cases where platforms have been exempted from liability in practice through some special means in supervision,and through different forms of defenses in litigation.In that case,this essay tries to investigate the boundaries of the liability of e-commerce platform business through the case researches,re-understands the legislative intents of the e-commerce law and then reinterprets the law.Lastly,this essay also proposes some suggestions for the e-commerce platform autonomy,protecting intellectual property,handling infringements complaints and setting a continuously-monitoring system for potential infringement behaviors. |
PDF Full Text Request