Digital supervision system needed as IP disputes increase

While Beijing prosecutors have witnessed a sharp rise in intellectual property cases related to the digital and artificial intelligence fields, they have also pledged to enhance the application of AI in case handling and promote the establishment of a digital supervision system, a report said.

On Friday, the People's Procuratorate of Beijing Municipality released an IP report showing that prosecutors across the city handled a total of 1,083 IP disputes in 2024, marking a year-on-year growth of 13.64 percent.

Among these cases, 91 criminal cases focused on infringement and piracy in the digital industry, a 3.55-fold increase compared with the previous year, the report noted, adding that these cases mainly covered areas such as digital music, online games, online literary works, data management platform software and business secrets.

For example, in Xicheng district, prosecutors initiated a lawsuit against a defendant surnamed Liu, a former technician at an online paid knowledge-based company, as Liu was found to have used his internal account to access and modify the platform database after leaving the company.

Liu was also discovered to have illegally obtained activation codes for the company's audio and video paid membership services and sold them on secondhand trading markets, and stole the balances of more than 10 member accounts on the company's platform to purchase books online.

The report revealed that the defendant had already been given a prison term and fines for the crimes of copyright infringement and theft.

Liu Jing, an official from the People's Procuratorate of Beijing Municipality, said at a news conference that IP cases related to new technologies and emerging sectors, including AI, biomedicine, and information and communication, have also been increasing in frequency.

Citing a case handled by prosecutors in Tongzhou district as an example, he recalled that some individuals downloaded images of popular artworks from online platforms and asked an AI-based image generator, powered by a large-scale data model hosted overseas, to process these images into pictures that were substantially identical to the original works.

Subsequently, they made collages from the AI-generated pictures and sold them online for profit.

"This was the first case in the Tongzhou jurisdiction involving copyright infringement through the use of AI-generated content," Liu Jing said.

To ensure the quality and efficiency of IP case handling, the official said: "We have set up 15 IP prosecution offices citywide to meet the capital's goals of building an international center for technology innovation and a benchmark city for the global digital economy, with stronger protection of copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets."

A cross-regional mechanism to strengthen the fight against IP crimes with prosecutors in Tianjin city and Hebei province has also been established to further support the integrated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, according to Liu Jing.

In addition, 43 experts have been appointed as technical investigators or think tank members to assist the city's prosecutors in addressing technical problems in IP disputes, he said.

Considering the continuous increase in IP cases, he called on Beijing prosecutors to build a database of key offenders, high-risk regions, focal entities and priority areas in IP infringement by leveraging AI technologies for automated correlation analysis and comparative assessment.

He also said that a digital supervision system for strengthening IP protection will be gradually constructed.