Despite the People’s Republic of China taking a notoriously aggressive stance against cryptocurrencies, the Asian superpower is leading the charge in the adoption of distributed ledger technology. In fact, a staggering 68% of global blockchain related patents that are issued originate from Chinese firms.
The Supreme People’s Court of China on Friday, September 7th, announced a ruling that stated blockchain technology can now be legally used in court to confirm the authenticity of evidence in legal disputes.
The new ruling, which took immediate effect upon being announced, clarified a number of issues relating to how internet courts in the nation should conduct the process of reviewing and ruling on legal disputes.
The new regulation states that Chinese internet courts shall recognize the legality of distributed ledger technology, as a means of storing and authenticating digital evidence, under condition that involved parties can prove the veracity of the technology employed in the process.
The Supreme Court made the following statement:
Internet courts shall recognize digital data that are submitted as evidence if relevant parties collected and stored these data via blockchain with digital signatures, reliable timestamps and hash value verification or via a digital deposition platform, and can prove the authenticity of such technology used,
The decree comes in response to the various legal conundrums that have arisen since the establishment of the country’s first internet court, last year in Hangzhou. In June of 2017, a dispute over copyrights between a media firm and an IT company set new precedent when the Hangzhou internet court ruled that blockchain would, for the first time, be used to authenticate digital evidence.
China’s internet court, was instituted to handle the growing number of internet and digital copyright related disputes. The Hangzhou court was the first to be established, but Chinese authorities plan to set up internet courts in the country’s capital Beijing, and Guangzhou to response to the growing demand for mediation in the field of technology.
