How to Determine the Platform's Liability for Infringement and Vocational Skills Training in Legal Search
With the spring breeze bringing warmth, ZY held the first business training and the first vocational skills training of the year on March 14 and March 28, 2024, respectively, with Lawyer Tian Yu and Lawyer Wang Kunshu as the speakers. The partners, Ms. Li Xiaohong, Mr. Dan Pingyuan, Ms. Liu Mengling and Ms. Wang Jin, participated in the two meetings. More than 20 participants, including senior/junior lawyers, paralegals and legal secretaries attended the trainings.
The business training on 14 March 2024 was conducted by Ms. Tian Yu, who combined her practical experience to share how to determine the infringement liability of online platforms, aiming to clarify exceptions to the “safe harbor” principle and share some hands-on experience.
Ms. Tian firstly introduced the role the platform shall play and its duty of care during the operation, transitioning from the traditional "remove-notify" obligations of platforms to a deeper analysis of the duties of reasonable care before, during, and after the obligation. She also dissected the potential legal liabilities that platforms may bear, including direct liability and contributory liability for the infringement. Ms. Tian then elaborated on current laws, regulations, judicial interpretations, and trial guidelines regarding the standard to determine the platform’s liability for contributory infringement, clarified the standards of “know or should have known” and providing attendees with a basic approach to determining the infringement liability.
At the same time, combined with the cases of the current judicial practice to determine the platform’s liability for contributory infringement, Ms. Tian led the participants to a more in-depth understanding of the standards of “know or should have known” under the specific manifestations of the platform's liability. The cases discussed by Ms. Tian Yu touched upon the forefront of legal principles and practical experiences regarding platform responsibilities, offering valuable references and insights to the audience and sparking lively discussions. During the session, Ms. Liu Mengling, partner of ZY, made some comments on the key issue and shared her insights on handling issues involving how to determine the platform’s liability, with a view to guiding the participants to make an example and develop their thinking.
On March 28, 2024, ZY held the first vocational skills training of the year as scheduled, and lawyer Wang Kunshu shared legal search skills with the participants. Ms. Wang Kunshu has worked in a well-known legal big data company and has a deep research and understanding of legal search databases. At the meeting, she shared her experience and skills from five aspects.
Specifically, Ms. Wang first introduced the common legal databases in the market and various official regulations and case databases, and emphasized the authenticity of regulations and case citations at the beginning of the training. When necessary, third-party databases and official authoritative databases shall be used in conjunction with important regulations and case content, and repeated inspections shall be made to ensure the timeliness and accuracy of the cited content. Subsequently, Ms. Wang introduced the types, usage methods and common use scenarios of advanced search functions to the participants in combination with the functional partitions of common third-party legal databases on the market. Ms. Wang also analyzed the characteristics, differences and applicable scenarios of several commonly used methods in legal search, such as "title search/full-text search" and "precise search/fuzzy search".
Finally, Ms. Wang shared the method of extracting keywords when conducting legal searches, and showed how to expand more and more accurate keywords through methods such as "replacement", "expansion" and "restriction". In addition, Ms. Wang also introduced other commonly used search statements and search platforms, and briefly sorted out the ideas of organizing a large number of search contents into search reports based on practical experience.
Determining the liability of platforms for infringement is currently one of the core needs for many enterprises. It is also one of the forefront issues in judicial practice. Legal search, on the other hand, is an essential skill for lawyers. At the beginning of the year 2024, the two trainings organized by ZY raised new questions and provided new perspectives for our lawyers in terms of legal practical and professional skills respectively. In the future, ZY will continue to hold such trainings on a regular basis, with the expectation of improving the overall fighting force of the team from the two aspects mentioned above, so as to better provide quality legal services to our clients.
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