On April 21, 2026, Beijing’s top prosecutorial body partnered with China’s national Copyright Protection Center to roll out one of the country’s first integrated “blockchain + copyright prosecution” systems, a technological innovation built to streamline copyright authentication and evidence evaluation for intellectual property legal proceedings.
The new platform was developed to address three persistent pain points that have long slowed copyright case processing for Chinese prosecutors: authenticating ownership documentation, tracing the original origin of copyrighted works, and verifying convoluted licensing and transfer agreement chains. Over the past three years, Beijing’s procuratorial organs have recorded a steady annual increase in the share of criminal copyright cases handled, with civil copyright supervision cases consistently making up more than half of all intellectual property casework, data from the procuratorate shows.
Dou Libo, a senior intellectual property prosecutor with the Beijing Municipal People’s Procuratorate, explained that the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence has drastically raised the sophistication of intellectual property fraud, creating new challenges for legal authorities. “In the AI era, falsification techniques are evolving constantly,” Dou noted. “When parties submit copyright ownership certificates, prosecutors on their own have limited ability to verify authenticity, and traditionally have to carry out time-consuming, extensive evidence collection and cross-checking.”
Beyond AI-driven forgery risks, the existing copyright ecosystem also suffers from fragmented registration data with no unified, authoritative verification channel. Compounding this, copyright transactions regularly involve multiple layers of sublicensing and tangled contractual arrangements, making it nearly impossible to confirm valid authorization if any link in the chain is lost.
Leveraging blockchain’s core inherent feature of immutable, tamper-proof data storage, the new platform creates a fully closed, transparent workflow for evidence submission, cross-comparison and result feedback. It can rapidly authenticate the legitimacy of copyright certificates, flag fraudulent information, and integrate seamlessly with China’s national Digital Copyright Chain. For complex multi-party copyright transfer arrangements, the platform aggregates fragmented data on ownership confirmation and licensing permissions, allowing prosecutors to reconstruct the full lifecycle of a registered copyrighted work from initial creation through all transfers and official contract filing.
New data from a White Paper on Intellectual Property Prosecution Work published by the Beijing procuratorate underscores the urgent need for this innovation: in 2025 alone, Beijing’s procuratorial organs handled 1,195 intellectual property cases, representing a 10.34 percent year-on-year increase. The caseload breaks down into 744 criminal IP cases, 255 civil cases, 183 administrative cases and 13 public interest litigation cases.
The white paper also reveals shifting trends in intellectual property disputes across the capital. Cases tied to emerging digital sectors continue to grow at an accelerated pace: prosecutors handled 113 AI and data-related IP cases last year, covering contentious legal issues ranging from AI-assisted copyright infringement to the legal status of AI training datasets and ownership of data-generated intellectual property.
Copyright disputes in creative industries remain the most prevalent category of cases. Beijing prosecuted 122 criminal copyright cases in 2025, with 75.41 percent centered on film, animation, gaming and related creative content sectors. In addition, the number of foreign-related intellectual property cases also rose, reaching 244 cases that accounted for 20.42 percent of Beijing’s total 2025 IP caseload. These cases spanned trademark infringement, copyright protection and geographical indication disputes, and the Beijing procuratorate reports that its commitment to the principle of equal protection for all rights holders, regardless of nationality, has earned widespread international and domestic recognition.