Douyin Suing Shuabao for Scraping 50,000 Short Videos from its App

Beijing Weiboshijie Co., Ltd. (hereafter referred to as Weibo company) has filed a lawsuit against Beijing Chuangrui Culture&Media Co., Ltd. (hereafter referred to as Chuangrui company) and Chengdu Liao Culture Communication Co., Ltd. (hereafter referred to as Li’ao company) for unfair competition that app Shuabao has ripped short videos and related comments from app Douyin through technical or manual methods and published them on its own platform.

During the lawsuit, Weibo company required Chuangrui company and Li’ao company to stop scraping videos and attached comments from app Douyin through technical or manual methods and publishing them on app Shuabao. Later Beijing Haidian People’s Court issued an injunction against the two owners of short video app Shuabao, prohibiting them from downloading short videos and related comments from app Douyin and uploading them to their own platform, Beijing Youth Daily reported on July 1.

Weibo company said in the filing that as the developer and operator of app Douyin, it has legal rights on the short videos and related comments in its app. The two respondents as competitors of Douyin, illegally scraped more than 50,000 short videos and attached comments from Douyin and published them on their jointly operated app Shuabao. The 50,000 videos have been obtained as evidence. Their behavior violated the provisions of Article 2 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, constituting unfair competition.

Li’ao denied its violation and stated that the scraped videos and comments were uploaded by users and that the majority of them were deleted after they had received notice from the court. They also argued that the remaining 1,220 videos were obtained legally and would not cause irreversible damage to Douyin. Chuangrui company denied being the developer and operator of app Shuabao.

After listening to the arguments of both parties and carefully examining the relevant evidence submitted by the parties, the court ruled that the accused did not provide sufficient proof to support their claims and that the behavior of the two respondents is likely to be unfair competition.

July 11, 2019

Source: Beijing Youth Daily

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