Decoding Judicial Reasoning in China: A Comparative Empirical Analysis of Guiding Cases

The judicial system in China recently started using legal precedents—known as guiding cases—as a new legal source to eliminate adjudicative inconsistency. Guiding cases (“GCs”) present the current judicial reasoning to some extent and can be used to predict the future of judicial reasoning in China. What are GCs? What legal issues do GCs address? How do they address legal issues? How do GCs affect the legal system and adjudication in China? This Article answers these questions with empirical evidence and comparisons to judicial reasoning in the United States. It is the first empirical research providing a systematic review of all the GCs published by November 2019. GCs are de facto binding and treated as legal precedents by Chinese judges, even though the literature used to heavily debate whether they are “common-law precedents.” This Article’s research rejects the dichotomy between civil law and common law in the modern age. Instead, after reviewing the development and history of law in China, this Article argues that the Chinese legal system is in fact a dynamic mix between the civil and common law systems. The empirical design revisits American jurisprudential criteria to decode judicial reasoning in China. Even though these jurisprudential criteria are debatable by themselves, the hypotheses and the coding strategy rely on their overlaps and conflicts – a public or private interest-concentrated perspective: How do Chinese courts treat the public and private interests under the various degrees of government intervention? The empirical analyses in this Article suggest that Chinese courts are on the path towards pragmatism and that there are common characteristics of the judicial reasoning in China shared by the U.S. Supreme Court. On the one hand, judges in China are state agents and follow state policies. They address social concerns and the public interest, which do not necessarily harm private interests or suggest conflicts with private interests. On the other hand, the Chinese courts are independent from administrative agencies, even though they defer to government interpretations of law to a greater extent than the U.S. Supreme Court

Judicial Reward Allocation for Asymmetric Secrets

Trade secret literature does not thoroughly consider information asymmetries between companies and employees. This Article visualizes the flows of technical information in and between companies and employees and categorizes two types of information asymmetries in the information transactions. The information asymmetries cannot be effectively governed by contracts and trade secret law. Companies employ covenants not to compete (“CNCs”), non-disclosure agreements (“NDAs”), and trade secret protection to shift the legal risks borne by employees from the disclosure risks borne by the companies, both restraining and aggravating the information asymmetries. The contracts and the law cannot increase employee loyalty to eliminate the information asymmetries. The risk shifting is not only costly to the companies, but it also harms innovation by employees and society due to the inevitable information asymmetries. Moreover, courts are inconsistent in enforcing the contracts and trade secret law for promoting innovation and other policy reasons. This Article revisits the literature that concerns the balance and the efficiency of the contracts and trade secret law for innovation. It argues that courts reward companies for training employees and investing in innovation by enforcing trade secrets and CNCs to supplement the ineffective NDAs used by companies. CNCs are less efficient for innovation than trade secret law. Thus, this Article suggests that courts rely on a strong trade secret regime when distributing training and innovation rewards. The strong trade secret regime adopts the inevitable disclosure doctrine and allows a broad scope of trade secret protection, rather than enforcing broad NDAs or CNCs, which are less efficient for innovation than trade secret law. At least, this regime should not impair employee loyalty

The Copyright Requirement of Human Authorship for Works Containing Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content

The U.S. Copyright Office (the “Office”) unwaveringly refuses to register copyrights for artworks created by artificial intelligence (“AI”) systems. The prima facie reason is a lack of authorship because the U.S. copyright regime recognizes only humans as authors. However, the fundamental reason lies in the fact that legislators have not yet determined whether to grant copyrights to AI users. Despite adjustments made by the Office in response to the use of AI systems in creation, the agency’s implementation of copyright statutes suggests that it remains extremely conservative, rejecting any AI-generated content (“AIGC”) from copyright registration. Will the copyright regime continue to exclude AIGC from copyright protection, and what are the probable consequences of this exclusion? This essay revisits the Office’s responses to copyright applicants regarding AIGC and elucidates the standards applied by the Office. Based on these standards and their underlying rules, the essay provides suggestions to the Office and predicts the probable future of the authorship requirement in the copyright law

Decoding Judicial Reasoning in China: A Comparative Empirical Analysis of Guiding Cases

The judicial system in China recently started using legal precedents—known as guiding cases—as a new legal source to eliminate adjudicative inconsistency. Guiding cases (“GCs”) present the current judicial reasoning to some extent and can be used to predict the future of judicial reasoning in China. What are GCs? What legal issues do GCs address? How do they address legal issues? How do GCs affect the legal system and adjudication in China? This Article answers these questions with empirical evidence and comparisons to judicial reasoning in the United States. It is the first empirical research providing a systematic review of all the GCs published by November 2019. GCs are de facto binding and treated as legal precedents by Chinese judges, even though the literature used to heavily debate whether they are “common-law precedents.” This Article’s research rejects the dichotomy between civil law and common law in the modern age. Instead, after reviewing the development and history of law in China, this Article argues that the Chinese legal system is in fact a dynamic mix between the civil and common law systems. The empirical design revisits American jurisprudential criteria to decode judicial reasoning in China. Even though these jurisprudential criteria are debatable by themselves, the hypotheses and the coding strategy rely on their overlaps and conflicts – a public or private interest-concentrated perspective: How do Chinese courts treat the public and private interests under the various degrees of government intervention? The empirical analyses in this Article suggest that Chinese courts are on the path towards pragmatism and that there are common characteristics of the judicial reasoning in China shared by the U.S. Supreme Court. On the one hand, judges in China are state agents and follow state policies. They address social concerns and the public interest, which do not necessarily harm private interests or suggest conflicts with private interests. On the other hand, the Chinese courts are independent from administrative agencies, even though they defer to government interpretations of law to a greater extent than the U.S. Supreme Court

Stimulating technical innovation by small and medium-sized enterprises in China

The effect of innovation on the economy is increasingly obvious and important in many countries, including China. In order to encourage and sustain technological innovation, Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) are not only necessary but also vital. This dissertation is an empirical study to test what critical measures the government should adopt and balance in order to efficiently pursue its goal of increasing innovation by SMEs. This dissertation focuses on the measures of intellectual property (IP), public sector, including the subsidies or grants from government, and private sector, the financial tools as the main capital resources for technology companies. The government makes the rules and policies for both a market-oriented economy and a government-oriented economy. However, under both models, the government should craft meaningful rules and regulations that benefit SMEs. Accordingly, government regulators need to know whether they should encourage the free market further or pursue command and control in the government-dominated sector. This study will evaluate the flexibility of the different administrative systems, rules and regulations of IP, taxes, subsidies, financial market and other related government actions. This study will use panel data regressions to study with the 140 public SMEs from two science parks in China, Zhongguan-Cun Science Park in Beijing and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai, to learn the efficiency of the variance of the rules and policies in their innovation between 2009 and 2013, especially when the rules and policies are criticized by other countries as a weak IP regime, over subsidies, weak lender protection and bad enforcement of financial contract. Moreover, this study will also use difference-in-difference estimations to study the impact of the 2011 tax policy changes in China and the 2012 patent subsidy policy change in Shanghai on the innovation, market performance and patenting behaviors of the 140 SMEs. Zhongguan-Cun Science Park and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park are two national model technical industry parks, and they include most of the enterprises developing technologies in Beijing or Shanghai. Usually, various types of national favoring policies apply to the firms in these two science parks ahead of the science parks in the other provinces in China. Their administrative measures are tested and analyzed, and those measures that are found to be successful and innovative are then applied to other science parks. Regardless of what caused the successful growth of the domestic companies, the Chinese government has kept providing funding, offering subsidies and attractive regulations to them. The main objective of the policies in the two parks is to create and to facilitate technical SMEs' survival and growth. The government also understands the important of the capital from the financial market, so it is providing guide funds and policies governing the financial market. In addition, the government is also guiding companies to use IP regimes to improve their ability to compete and the government expects original innovations from them to improve China’s ability to compete and innovate in the technology sector in a time of globalization. However, the costs of different measures are different, so it is necessary for the government to identify the most efficient strategies to encourage SMEs' creation. Hence, besides independently testing the efficiency of each approach of the policies, this study combines and compares the efficiency of the three approaches of policies in stimulating the SME to innovate. The results from this work will not only help the government of China to understand the strategies adopted by the two cities for stimulating technical innovation by SMEs but also help to engineer similar science parks in the other provinces. In addition, this work will help other developing countries to learn effective strategies involving policies, laws and regulations to create SMEs, and to simultaneously develop technological innovation and the economies of their countries

The Organic Amendment Improve the Yield and Quality of Vegetable

Using biotechnology, we can change agricultural wastes into high‐quality organic fertilizers, which leads us in the direction of the development in modern agriculture and act as substitute to the chemical fertilizers. In this chapter, five types of technologies of organic amendment are elaborated. Each method can be selected based on the specific circumstance. The effects of the technology in the production are introduced and the principles of the technologies are explained in a simple manner

How Hard is Takeover in DPoS Blockchains? Understanding the Security of Coin-based Voting Governance

Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) blockchains, such as EOSIO, Steem and TRON, are governed by a committee of block producers elected via a coin-based voting system. We recently witnessed the first de facto blockchain takeover that happened between Steem and TRON. Within one hour of this incident, TRON founder took over the entire Steem committee, forcing the original Steem community to leave the blockchain that they maintained for years. This is a historical event in the evolution of blockchains and Web 3.0. Despite its significant disruptive impact, little is known about how vulnerable DPoS blockchains are in general to takeovers and the ways in which we can improve their resistance to takeovers. In this paper, we demonstrate that the resistance of a DPoS blockchain to takeovers is governed by both the theoretical design and the actual use of its underlying coin-based voting governance system. When voters actively cooperate to resist potential takeovers, our theoretical analysis reveals that the current active resistance of DPoS blockchains is far below the theoretical upper bound. However in practice, voter preferences could be significantly different. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of the passive takeover resistance of EOSIO, Steem and TRON. Our study identifies the diversity in voter preferences and characterizes the impact of this diversity on takeover resistance. Through both theoretical and empirical analyses, our study provides novel insights into the security of coin-based voting governance and suggests potential ways to improve the takeover resistance of any blockchain that implements this governance model.Comment: This work has been accepted by ACM CCS 202

Research on Modeling and Experiment of Glass Substrate Peeling Based on Adhesion Theory

In this paper, the peeling of glass substrates is modeled, in a setting of automatic polishing and grinding for flat panel display glass substrates. The mechanical model of glass substrates-adhesive pad structure is established. The vacuum adsorbing force between them is regarded as adhesive force. The model is simplified as a distributed spring group which can describe the desorption and shear behavior of the glass substrates-adhesive pad structure. The corresponding analytical solution method is proposed. Finally, experiment is conducted to verify the accuracy and feasibility of the proposed mechanical model