Company: ZHIHF
Filing Date: 2025-04-15
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001410578-25-000729
Chunk: 37

Company: Zhihu Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-15
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 3
Chunk 37
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 their membership privilege or illegally distribute paid content exclusively available to paid members, which could materially and adversely affect our business. Furthermore, we may have difficulty addressing the threats to our business associated with infringement of our copyrighted content, particularly our premium content available under our Yan Selection membership program. Our content may be potentially subject to unauthorized copying and illegal digital dissemination without any economic return to us. We adopt a variety of measures to mitigate such risks, including by litigation and through technology measures. However, we cannot assure you that such measures will be effective in protecting our intellectual property rights.

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While we typically require our employees, consultants, and contractors who may be involved in the development of intellectual properties to execute agreements assigning such intellectual property rights to us, we may fail to execute such an agreement with each party who in fact develops intellectual properties that we regard as our own. In addition, such agreements may not be self-executing such that the intellectual property rights subject to such agreements may be assigned to us only with additional assignments being executed, and we may fail to obtain such assignments. Furthermore, such agreements may be breached. Accordingly, we may be forced to act against third parties, or defend claims that they may bring against us relating to the ownership of such intellectual property rights.

Managing or preventing unauthorized use of intellectual properties is difficult and expensive, and we may need to resort to litigation or other legal proceedings to enforce or defend intellectual property rights or to determine the enforceability, scope, and validity of our proprietary rights or those of others. Such litigation or other legal proceedings and an adverse determination in any such litigation or other legal proceedings could result in significant costs and diversion of resources and management attention, which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

If we fail to implement and maintain an effective system of internal controls over financial reporting, we may be unable to accurately report our results of operations, meet our reporting obligations or prevent fraud, and investor confidence and the market prices of our Class A ordinary shares and the ADSs may be materially and adversely affected.

We are a public company in the United States and are subject to the reporting requirements of the Exchange Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and the rules and regulations of the New York Stock Exchange. Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires that we include a report from management on our internal control over financial reporting in our annual report on Form 20-F. In addition, as we ceased to be an “