The Beijing Chaoyang District Market Supervision Bureau recently made a decision on the city's first administrative penalty case involving trade secrets in the AIGC industry. It issued a fine of 100,000 yuan against an employee who took confidential information and used it to copy and use the original company's AI commercial software. The case was disclosed today by the Beijing Municipal Market Supervision Bureau and marks a breakthrough in administrative enforcement in this field.
"Copy - Crack - Reuse Across Companies" Complete Evidence Chain
The rights holder company mainly engages in foreign language dubbing and AI multilingual film subtitling for micro-short videos, and is a key enterprise for overseas expansion. Its independently developed internal AIGC commercial software significantly shortens the subtitling time and is an intangible asset of core competitiveness. A core employee copied and cracked the accompanying database while employed, and after leaving, started a new company and continued to use the software to take competitive orders for profit.
Given the characteristics of AIGC commercial secrets, such as being hidden, high threshold, and easy to lose evidence, law enforcement officers first fixed data on the involved computers and servers through electronic data evidence collection. Then, by cross-comparing software installation traces, database access logs, and project output files, they reconstructed the entire process of copying, cracking, and reusing across companies, forming a complete chain of evidence. According to Article 26 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, the involved party was fined 100,000 yuan and received guidance on improving confidentiality measures such as permission grading, log recording, and exit audits.
This case is the first administrative confirmation that AIGC commercial software can be protected as a trade secret, and also proves that regulators can now overcome the difficulties of evidence collection in this field using electronic evidence collection. It clearly defines the boundaries: employees can switch platforms, but cannot take their former company's AI digital assets as capital for entrepreneurship. Beijing has taken a substantial step forward in protecting trade secrets in new forms of the digital economy.
