In the era of the digital economy, data crawling has become an important means for enterprises to gain competitive advantages, but it has also triggered a large number of unfair competition disputes. For a long time, judicial practice has relied on the general clauses of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law for adjudication, which has problems such as inconsistent standards and vague scope of protection. The newly revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law in 2025 adds a special clause on data protection, clarifies the constituent elements of unfair competition acts in data crawling, and provides a special normative basis for regulating data crawling acts. Combining academic theories and judicial cases, this paper starts from the legal characterization dilemmas of data crawling, interprets the normative connotation of the special data clause in the new law, analyzes the key controversial issues in its application, and puts forward specific suggestions for improving the legal regulation of data crawling, aiming to realize the balance of interests between data circulation and rights protection.
Zhou Maocuo (Wed,) studied this question.