Evidentiary Standards for Trade Secret Misappropriation in Labor Arbitration
PRC labor arbitration requires employers to prove contractual breach, asset confidentiality, and exact damages without statutory burden shifting.
Electronic Evidence Cunzheng
Meaning
A digital preservation method secures electronic records, website content, and communication logs on decentralized or third-party repositories to ensure their integrity for future litigation. Within Chinese legal practice, electronic evidence cunzheng provides a verified trail of evidence that prevents alteration and guarantees authenticity. This process is commonly used to protect intellectual property, online contract signatures, and trade secrets from being manipulated.
Judicial Recognition
A set of provisions from the Supreme People’s Court explicitly validates the use of blockchain and secure time-stamping for evidence submission. For electronic evidence cunzheng to be accepted by a judge, the platform used must demonstrate high security standards and a reliable chain of custody. This recognition allows courts to accept digital evidence without requiring a traditional notary public, which reduces the time and cost associated with litigation.
The admissibility of such evidence is highly dependent on the credibility of the platform and the security of the underlying technology.
Technical Preservation
A secure system automatically records the hash value of the digital asset at the moment of its creation or capture. Under electronic evidence cunzheng procedures, the actual file or its metadata is uploaded to a distributed ledger or a secure server, creating an immutable time stamp. This technical foundation proves that the document existed in that exact state at that specific time.
Dispute Application
The execution of this preservation technique occurs primarily before formal disputes are initiated to capture volatile digital data. Under electronic evidence cunzheng rules, companies can secure unauthorized online listings, infringing products on e-commerce sites, or internal email logs before they are deleted. Quick preservation prevents the loss of important digital traces.