Zhao Dexin, an octogenarian professor, sued CNKI about the rights protection incident. Many netizens questioned: Is CNKI suspected of monopoly? The reporter interviewed Sun Jin, director of the Competition Law and Competition Policy Research Center of Wuhan University and professor of the Law School of Wuhan University.
Sun Jin said, "The court's judgment that CNKI lost the lawsuit shows that CNKI's behavior has violated the values of fairness, equality, honesty and credibility pursued by the law." ”
The monopoly of the database on digital academic resources, especially the exclusive digital publishing rights of academic journals obtained by academic database operators through "exclusive authorization", has thus become a legal monopoly.
Sun Jin said that the products provided by the academic database are different from the general commodities, the academic literature is an important carrier that brings together the achievements of human intelligence, which is irreplaceable, once the copyright resources of the academic literature form a monopoly, the supply mode is single, and the abuse of market dominance carried out by the operators by virtue of this monopoly advantage is more harmful than the abuse of the market dominance in the general commodity market field.
In the general commodity society, if there is no market barrier, when the operator monopolizes a certain commodity and obtains high monopoly profits, it will prompt other potential competitors to enter the market to compete with it by investing more capital, and the monopoly position of the commodity will be broken. However, in the field of academic databases, due to the protection of the Copyright Law, this monopoly of copyright resources itself has a strong exclusivity.
For example, Sun Jin, knowledge products themselves have a strong irreplaceability, just as the journal Nature cannot replace the journal of Cytology, when large academic database operators have monopolized the copyright resources of authoritative academic literature, these academic data publishers have gained a "transcendent" position in the relevant market, and the price competition mechanism is difficult to play a role.
In pursuit of profit maximization, academic database operators will unscrupulously raise the price of their databases, which not only damages public resources, but also raises the audience threshold of these journals, making it impossible for knowledge to be widely disseminated, thus forming a "knowledge monopoly".
Sun Jin frankly said that in order to determine whether CNKI has implemented the monopolistic behavior prohibited by China's Anti-Monopoly Law, it is necessary to follow the general idea of anti-monopoly case review, that is, the relevant market definition, market dominance determination and abuse behavior judgment.
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, works in her home study, cleaning up books and materials on her desk. Photo by reporter Gao Yong
In the definition of the relevant market, there is still a dispute as whether the relevant market involved in the act should be defined as a free literature search service market or a paid literature online reading and download market.
In terms of market dominance, a legal journal paper published in May 2019 disclosed that CNKI's full-text journal database contains 3964 exclusive and unique authorized journals, accounting for 43% of the total number of journals in China; of which 778 core journals, accounting for about 42% of all core journals; 194 kinds of journals including the top 3 journals in various disciplines, accounting for 64% of the total number of top 3 journals. Compared with hundreds of exclusive journals of Wipro Consulting and Wanfang Data, CNKI obviously has significant intellectual property advantages, and the exclusive journals it includes are far higher than other operators in the same field in terms of quantity and quality.
Finally, in terms of whether the behavior is abusive, it is necessary to judge whether CNKI has a legitimate reason in the pricing and other acts in a case-by-case manner.
"All monopolies are easy to abuse, which is an experience that has not been easy for eternity." Sun Jin said frankly, "If the academic database no longer uses copyright protection as a catalyst to stimulate innovation, but instead uses it as a means to grab high monopoly profits, arbitrarily abuse copyright to implement monopoly high prices, undermine, hinder and restrict relevant market competition, its abuse cannot escape the review and punishment of the Anti-Monopoly Law." ”
"Anti-monopoly law enforcement departments should respond to this hot social incident." Sun Jin suggested.
(Guangming Daily all-media reporter Chen Peng)
Source: Guangming Daily all-media reporter Chen Peng
Editor-in-charge: Wang Zimo
Editors: Wang Yuanfang, Sun Xiaoting, Wu Yaqi