Qin Ran, Liu Yutong, Luan Minzhu
Against the backdrop of the digital economy, enterprise data has become a core factor of production across industries. At present, China's intellectual-property-related laws, including the Copyright Law and the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, still lack targeted regulatory mechanisms for protecting enterprise data. Using literature review, comparative analysis, and case analysis, this study systematically examines the nature, types, and legal attributes of enterprise data and identifies the limitations of applying traditional copyright, trade-secret, and patent regimes to such data. Drawing on representative disputes such as the Taobao Business Advisor case and the unfair-competition dispute involving the Shuabao app, the study further demonstrates four practical difficulties: unclear ownership, difficult transactions, frequent infringement, and impeded rights enforcement. Through a comparative analysis of the legislation and judicial implementation of the European Union's data-protection and database sui generis rights regime and the U.S. database protection regime, this article builds on the ‘separation of three rights’ policy in the Twenty Measures for Data. It proposes tiered rules for establishing rights in raw, processed, and derivative data; constructs a composite protection model comprising residual protection under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, empowerment through a new sui generis data right, and blockchain-based registration and evidence preservation; and develops supporting mechanisms involving national legislation, data archiving, enterprise risk control, and the balancing of stakeholder interests. The findings provide a theoretical reference for the market-oriented allocation of data factors, the lawful and compliant use of enterprise data, and fair and consistent adjudication, thereby contributing to the improvement of China's digital rule-of-law framework.
Digital economy; Enterprise data; Data intellectual property rights; Tiered rights determination; Data factor market