On January 7, 2016 at the Beijing, Haidian Court, a hearing took place in which Wang Xin and others members of the company QVOD were on trial for spreading of pornographic materials.
Wang Xin, who denied the allegations in court is the subject of intense public scrutiny. According to those in attendance, Prosecutors did not gain the upper hand at the hearing. Apparently, the expertise of the Defendants’ technical staff and their frequent witty excuses, took the prosecution by surprise.
The focus of this particular dispute boils down to how much knowledge the courts can impute to the legal representative of the company with regards to the company being used to spread porn. In particular, whether the legal representative should have made sure that his managers took more than a laissez-faire approach to the content on the company’s servers.
The reasoning of the prosecution thus far appears to have been that a large number of Internet users who knowingly used QVOD software to watch and download pornographic videos. Apparently, QVOD adopted a laissez-faire attitude and even connivance with the uploaders, to earn money through traffic, affiliates, advertising and other means which constitute full compliance with this crime.
The Defendants refused to admit liability. The Defendants said that although knowing that Internet users use the software to watch and download pornographic videos, that they did not adopt a laissez-faire attitude, but actively took preventive measures.
According to the Defendants its internal network “110 system” won awards Shenzhen public security organs was an active preventative measure. Although the measures taken were not successful due to technical, financial and other objective conditions, they were still taken nonetheless. The failure of the measures themselves could not be attributed to the suspect, nor did they represent laissez-faire behavior on the part of management.
The Defendants further argued that the Prosecution should submit evidence to prove that they had the ability to implement more effective preventive measures and deliberately chose not to do so. This would be very difficult to prove. Even if the prosecution could prove the existence of more efficient technology and better methods of controlling content, to prove the suspect intentionally did not implement such methods would require a substantial chain of evidence.
This very simple article is being written by a very simple man, who is totally ignorant of the complexities of the technology involved. However, it seems to me like a Chewbacca Defence is being employed here – very well in fact! However, there is a very effective technological solution to stop the spread of pornography via a network. I believe it has existed for over 100 years. It is called a plug. You simply pull it! If one can’t control the content on one’s own system, perhaps it’s time to pull the plug.
This article was written by Chris Fung based on an article by Mike Yu.