China’s integration of blockchain technology in judicial practices is critical to resolve digital copyright infringement.

Blockchain technology has emerged as the underlying technology of Bitcoin, and it is a decentralized infrastructure and distributed computing paradigm.1 Specifically, blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that employs a chain of blocks to timestamp transaction data. Each data block is bundled to the previous block in the blockchain through the cryptographic hash of the previous block and synchronized across all the users, thereby ensuring the data is irreversible; that is, data cannot be changed once the network has accepted that data.2 Such technology will dramatically reduce transaction costs, and once applied on a large scale, it will reshape the economic model.3 In other words, blockchain can be a disruptive technology to promote future economic growth in the new global technological and industrial revolution round. The integrated application of blockchain technology plays a vital role in new technological innovation and industrial transformation.4 Cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and 5G are thriving. With the development and advancement of China's Internet Courts5 and Smart Courts,6 blockchain electronic evidence is making a more significant contribution to judicial practice, especially in the digital copyright industry. In June 2018, the Hangzhou Internet Court announced a case of first impression involving blockchain evidence preservation, Huatai Yimei v. Daotong Technology.7 Since then, the application of electronic evidence stored on the blockchain in copyright cases has dramatically increased. According to the statistics published by ‘China Judgments Online’, between June 2018 and August 2023, there were 1430 cases of intellectual property ownership and infringement involving blockchain evidence, of which 1191 cases were copyright cases, and about 70 % of these cases regarded the infringement of the right of communication through an information network.8 We realize that blockchain evidence preservation technology is widely used in the era of digital copyright.

In the digital environment, the copyright owner's proof of ownership of his work, the defendant's infringing contents, and the damages are all in the form of electronic evidence. However, as a kind of evidence fixed in electronic equipment and formed with electronic technology, electronic evidence has flaws that are easily distorted or modified but difficult to detect.9 In addition, the creation time of online works is hard to determine, and the infringing contents are easy to delete, contributing to the critical issue of “difficulty in collecting evidence”10 in the cause of electronic notarization. Nevertheless, relevant legal practice11 and research12 have shown that blockchain technology can be adopted to collect, store, and fix related electronic data (Blockchain evidence) in online copyright disputes. As a result, blockchain evidence has remarkably become the most significant way for facts finding in Internet court trials.13