YouTube is a world-famous website. It can be found through Baidu Encyclopedia that the early company, located in San Bruno, California, was registered on February 15, 2005 and was founded by Chinese American Chen Shijun and others to let users download, watch and share movies or short films. In November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for US $1.65 billion and operated it as a subsidiary. On December 18, 2018, the 2018 World Top 500 Brands compiled by the World Brand Lab was announced, and YouTube ranked 20th.
In response to the introduction of Baidu Encyclopedia, the censors of the State Intellectual Property Office have identified in many cases of invalidation: YouTube is a large international video sharing website with high visibility, which has a complete network detection and audit mechanism. Unregistered users can directly watch videos, while registered users can upload videos. Once the videos are uploaded successfully, they can be viewed by online users. It is precisely because there is a huge amount of public video information on YouTube, which makes it an important source for IP peers to obtain Internet evidence together with Facebook.
However, it is regrettable that the judges of the People's Court may not have as good a knowledge of all kinds of foreign websites, including YouTube, as the censors of the State Intellectual Bureau. As part of the screenshots of the (2020) Yue 73 Early Republic of China Judgment No. 3694 show, the court of first instance has not accepted the extraterritorial evidence (involving the famous Wayback Machine website and YouTube website) provided to customers with full confidence, Encountered a stunning defeat!
After the court of first instance unfortunately "entered the pit", the reason statement can only be turned to the State Intellectual Property Office to declare the patent invalid to reverse the adverse situation. In the invalid oral examination procedure, both parties conducted full cross examination on the web crawling technology of "Wayback Machine" website and the video editing rules of YouTube website. As expected, the Reexamination and Invalidation Trial Department of the Patent Office finally fully supported the extraterritorial evidence of the case, which not only successfully invalidated the patents involved, but also successfully obtained the verdict of victory in the second instance stage.
In this article, the "pit depth" coefficient is marked as ⭐⭐， It is mainly considered that if we understand the relevant editing rules of YouTube website in advance in the foreign evidence collection stage and fully elaborate them in the cross examination process of the court of first instance, we should persuade the judge to recognize the "three natures" of YouTube video evidence in civil proceedings. To this end, we studied the video editing rules published on YouTube and shared the following screenshots:
According to the online video editing and modification rules published on YouTube:
——Publishers can delete videos uploaded to YouTube;
——The publisher cannot replace the video, because any new video uploaded will get a new URL;
——The publisher can change the existing video, but the change is only limited to: cut the video, that is, delete the beginning, middle or end of the video on the computer; And add cards to the uploaded video (without changing the video itself); Change the video title and description, that is, you can change the video title, type, description and privacy settings.
It can be seen from the video editing and modification rules that the publisher cannot substantially modify or add the content of the video itself. If a video needs to be added or replaced, the added or replaced video will point to a new URL, and the publishing time will be updated.
YouTube "Pit Avoidance" Guide
First of all, according to the above analysis, YouTube is a large international website with high popularity, high authority and high authenticity of videos published on it. Therefore, videos published on YouTube can truly reflect the existing technology at the time of release and serve as evidence of existing technology in patent litigation or right confirmation procedures. In the event that the other party only claims that the video is likely to be modified in general, but fails to provide convincing counter evidence, the authenticity and openness of the YouTube video submitted by our party and its qualification as existing technical evidence shall be determined.
Secondly, for evidence such as videos published by websites that cannot be browsed in China such as YouTube, the premise that it is adopted by the Patent Reexamination Board or the court as the existing technical evidence is that the party who adduces evidence must perform perfect notarization and authentication procedures in the country or region where the website can be accessed overseas (outside the region). In particular, the online video editing and modification rules published on YouTube are directly added to the public certificate of the domain in order to prevent the other party from "picking on" the other party during the cross examination stage, which may lead to a miscarriage of justice. This is the so-called preventive "escape pit"!
Finally, in the above real case, two types of extraterritorial Internet evidence are advocated, one is the web page from the "Wayback Machine" website (i.e. the Internet Archive), the other is the video from the YouTube website, and the two types of extraterritorial Internet evidence can be mutually verified.
In fact, for all Internet evidences from outside the territory, on the basis of fulfilling the above-mentioned notarization and certification procedures, according to the high probability standard, when reviewing and judging the authenticity, openness and probative power of Internet pages, videos and other public contents fixed in the form of notarial certificates, the production process of the relevant notarial certificates, the formation process of the web pages, videos and their release time To manage the website qualification, credit status, operation and management status, technical means adopted, information modification rules of the website and other relevant factors of the website and video, and to make a correct judgment on the authenticity, openness and evidentiality of the notarial certificate and the attached website and video with a high degree of probability standard in combination with other evidence of the case.