Hysome Cases | Ai v. He, Xu, and Beijing Kuaishou Technology Co., Ltd. to confirm the invalidity of the contract

Case description:

The plaintiff Ai and the defendant He are husband and wife. Ai discovered that He had purchased Kuaishou coins to reward the defendant Xu on the Kuaishou app operated by Kuaishou. Therefore, Ai went to court, arguing that the gift contract between He and Xu was invalid, and that Kuaishou and Xu shall share responsibility for refunding the reward amount. In this case, Kuaishou Company appointed our attorney Sun Binyan to respond to the lawsuit on its behalf in August 2020.

There are two focuses of dispute in this case:

one is whether the defendant He and the defendant Xu and Kuaishou Company formed a gift contract relationship and the validity of the contract;

second, whether the defendant Xu and Kuaishou Company shall return the corresponding amount to the plaintiff.

The case went through two trials. In January 2021, the court of first instance found that the plaintiff and defendant Kuaishou Company did not constitute a gift contract relationship, and ruled to dismiss all of the claims proposed by the plaintiff against Kuaishou. After the plaintiff appealed, the court of second instance upheld the original judgement of the first instance in June of the same year and rejected the appeal.

This case was about the live streaming reward. At the time, the court was quite controversial about the determination of the legal relationship between the parties involved in such cases. Attorney Sun Binyan acted for Kuaishou in responding to the lawsuit, further clarifying the three-law relationship among users, anchors, and live streaming platforms, and explained that the live streaming platform, as a neutral technical service provider, has paid huge human, material, and capital investment costs in providing network technology services. The act of obtaining commercial benefits based on network service contracts signed with users and anchors should be protected by law. Attorney Sun's representative opinions were upheld by the courts of two instances, so that the clients' legitimate rights and interests were safeguarded.