Artificial Intelligence Cases in China: Feilin v. Baidu and Tencent Shenzhen v. Shanghai Yingxin

Abstract

In 2019, two court rulings in China on the issue of copyright ability of Al creations received international attention. It was reported that in Feilin v. Baidu, known as the first AI case, the Beging Internet Court denied copyright of AI creations, whereas the Shenzhen Nanshan District People's Court acknowledged copyright of Al creations in the Tencent Dreamwriter case. The two cases, however, were quite similar, as they acknowledged copyright of Al-assisted, not Al-generated, written works and recognized these works as a work of a legal entity. The difference between the two judgments is that the Beying Internet Court regarded originality as an independent requirement and judged it according to the objective standard, whereas the Shenzhen Nanshan District People's Court regarded human creation as part of the requirement of originality. In this sense, it was the Beying Internet Court that actually made the more favorable judgment on an Al-generated work.