On January 16, the first case of illegally obtaining data by calling the server API interface and reselling it was settled. The Guangdong High People’s Court publicly pronounced the second-instance judgment on the unfair competition dispute case between Weimeng Company and Jianyixun Company and its Shenzhen branch, rejecting the appeal and upholding the original judgment: fully supporting Weimeng Company’s claim for compensation of 20 million yuan for economic losses.

Weimeng Company is the operator of the Sina Weibo platform, accusing Jianyixun Company of illegally calling the API (application programming interface) of the Weibo server to transmit data to the user terminal, scraping a large amount of Weibo backstage data and storing it, and selling it through its iDataAPI website. It requested the court to order Jianyixun Company to stop the unfair competition behavior, publish a statement to eliminate the impact, compensate for the economic loss of 20 million yuan and reasonable expenses of 500,000 yuan. The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court ruled in the first instance that Jianyixun Company constituted unfair competition and ordered it to compensate Weimeng Company for 20 million yuan and reasonable rights protection costs, and publish a statement to eliminate the impact. Jianyixun Company appealed to the Guangdong High Court.

The Guangdong High Court found out that Jianyixun Company changed the IP address and Weibo user account and other technical means every time it scraped Weibo data, in order to avoid the anti-scraping data protection measures of the Weibo server. The Weibo data sold by its iDataAPI website not only completely covered the corresponding display content on the Weibo webpage, but also contained a large amount of backstage service data generated by the Weibo platform operation and management process, as well as Weimeng Company’s big data product “Weibo Index”. The number of calls reached more than 2.179 billion times, and fees were charged according to the number of user calls to the data interface.

The Guangdong High Court held that Weimeng Company has the right to independently control, legally use and obtain economic benefits from the Weibo data it legally and legitimately holds. Jianyixun Company sent data requests to the Weibo server by constantly changing the IP address, Weibo user account and other methods, and obtained the calling authority of the dedicated data interface for transmitting data to the user terminal by the Weibo server, which it had no right to call. A large amount of Weibo backstage data, and directly resell it for profit, in violation of the principles of fairness, honesty and business ethics, disrupting the data market competition order, seriously damaging the legitimate rights and interests of Weimeng Company and consumers, constituting the unfair competition behavior stipulated in Article 2 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. According to the number of calls to Weibo data published by the iDataAPI website, which exceeded 2.1 billion times, calculated at the median charge standard of 1 yuan/100 times, Jianyixun Company’s illegal income exceeded 21.7979 million yuan. Considering that Jianyixun Company implemented multiple types of unfair competition behaviors, used malicious technical means, lasted for a long time, called a huge amount of Weibo data, caused serious damage, and used confusing service sources or business relationships to promote its infringing services and other factors, the court fully supported Weimeng Company’s claim for compensation of 20 million yuan. The court then made the above judgment.