Shanghai Court Upholds Copyright Protection for Clarivate’s JCR Database
The Shanghai Intellectual Property Court has upheld a judgment in favour of Clarivate in a dispute concerning the unauthorised use of data from its Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database. Intcolaw represented Clarivate. The court concluded that the selection and arrangement of the database content met the originality requirement for protection as a compilation work under Chinese copyright law.
Clarivate, the owner of the Web of Science and JCR databases, discovered in July 2018 that MedSci was using JCR journal impact factor data across websites and mobile applications without authorisation. Intcolaw advanced claims under copyright and anti-unfair competition law and preserved evidence through notarised screenshots and platform records. It also presented evidence of Clarivate’s chain of title in China.
The court ordered MedSci to cease the infringing activity, remove the relevant content and pay RMB 200,000 in damages together with RMB 34,694 in enforcement expenses. The appellate court upheld the judgment in full.
The court treated the selection and arrangement of the JCR content—not the underlying individual data—as the protected expression. It also found MedSci liable for providing links to infringing material and failing to verify authorisation.