Disclaimers of Liability

China Open Courts (COC) is a free service. Alternative sources of all information on COC are available.

Neither COC, nor the COC data providers, invite reliance upon, or accept responsibility for, the information COC provides, any uses to which that information is put, or any actions taken in consequence of the use of COC.

Neither COC, nor the COC data providers give any guarantees, undertakings or warranties concerning the accuracy, completeness or up-to-date nature of the information provided on COC. Users should confirm information from another source if it is of sufficient importance for them to do so. For official versions of legal reference materials, users should refer to their respective official publications.

Hypertext links on COC are inserted by COC, not by the COC data providers. Hypertext links on COC are inserted by automated means, and links will not be comprehensive or accurate in all cases. Neither COC, nor the COC data providers, give any guarantees, undertakings or warranties concerning the accuracy, comprehensiveness or any other aspect of hypertext linking. Hypertext links merely provide useful interconnections between information in some instances.

Privacy Policy

COC privacy policies are based on respect for international standards and comparative best practice of information privacy protection.

Information concerning usage of COC

COC collects information which identifies, for each page accessed on COC, the network identity of the machine which has accessed it. COC retains this usage information for purposes of network analysis, usage analysis, and research into usage patterns for the purpose of improving COC services. Access to and use of this information is restricted to COC management and staff, and to researchers working on COC projects and subject to an agreement to adhere to this Privacy Policy.

COC does not disclose or publish information which identifies individual machines, or potentially identifying sub-groupings of addresses, without consent. COC does publish aggregated information about usage patterns.

COC reserves the right to gather more extensive information that stated above (i) about any attempted access to COC which raise security issues (and, where necessary, to make disclosures to relevant authorities); and (ii) for network analyses on an occasional basis.

Personal information contained in COC databases

COC databases are purposive for enabling the public to use them as legal precedents on points of law, practices and procedure of the Courts and of public interest. Some COC databases contain personal information, including the decisions of Courts and Tribunals. The personal information is indeed available on the publicly available databases of relevant public bodies. It is the responsibility of the public bodies to determine, subject to international standards and the requirements of the laws under which they operate, the appropriate balance between the privacy interests of individuals and the public interests in dissemination of the information. In particular, if personal data is to be anonymised before publication, this is done by the public body concerned. COC does not and cannot censor part or all of the information that comes originally from publicly available databases of relevant public bodies.

COC does not give a general consent to the contents of these databases being indexed by other web sites. COC makes an exception to this general rule in some cases to allow other law web sites to index selected COC databases.

COC also monitors whether any robots attempt to index these databases in disregard of the Robots Exclusion Standard, and takes steps to exclude any that do so from any access to COC.

COC reserves the right to exclude access to its databases by users or sites that are in apparent breach of any such legal requirements.

If you have any comments or suggestions in relation to this policy, please send us your feedback to chinaopencourts@protonmail.com.

Usage Policy

General principles

• COC is a not-for-profit and open platform that provides free access to individual end-users of the content it provides, to enable them to read, print and copy materials for their personal use, and any other uses permitted by copyright law. Overall, COC aims to provide databases for enabling the public to use them as legal precedents on points of law, practices and procedure of the Courts and of public interest.
• COC is not a data repository, in that it does not provide a service for other publishers to obtain documents from COC for republication. Other publishers need to obtain those documents from their original sources or by other appropriate and authorised means.
• In relation to all documents that it publishes, COC does not give permission for the value-added content that it adds to documents (including hypertext mark-up, and alternative citations) to be republished by others. This does not include any restriction on the use of neutral citations used by COC, whether or not developed by COC.
• COC specifically blocks all spiders and other automated agents from accessing its case-law via the Robots Exclusion Standard. COC’ s policy is the same as nearly all similar organisations internationally. The reasons for this policy include: (i) the need to allow compliance with take-down, anonymisation and other modification requests from courts and parties; (ii) the need to comply with licence conditions under which data have been provided to COC; and (iii) the need to balance personal privacy against open access, particularly in relation to general purpose search engines.

End Use

• Individual end-users of the COC system are free to access, copy and print materials for their own use in accordance with copyright law;
• In relation to case law, this is subject to (I)(d) above.

Copyright

• COC is not the copyright owner in the source documents published on COC and is not able to give permission for reproduction of those source documents.
• COC claims copyright in all value-added content that it adds to source documents (including hypertext mark-up, and alternative citations). On request, COC usually gives permission for reproduction of examples of this content for education or research purposes.

Reuse of COC data by other commercial and non-commercial systems

• COC will not act as a data repository or supplier of source documents that it has obtained from their original sources to other publishers for republication. This applies to both active re-supply of documents, or passive re-supply via spidering or other automated collection. Where spidering or other automated collection for these purposes is apparent, it will be blocked.

This policy may be amended at COC’s discretion.

China Open Courts

February 1, 2025

All rights reserved 2025.