Recently, Partner Yizhou Liu from W&B’s Copyright & Trademark Litigation Department won a case known as the “Six Major Schools Case” that involved both copyright infringement and unfair competition against another company in the same industry. The details of the case, the issues at trial and the final verdict in the case were all reported in various legal newspapers.

Yizhou Liu, a Partner from W&B’s Copyright & Trademark Litigation Department, two other W&B attorneys, Peili Ye and Mengfei Yu, represented a well-known computer game company. Before the hearing they formulated a detailed plan for evidence collection and infringement comparison. During the hearing, they presented their arguments before the panel by citing relevant provisions of the Copyright Law and the Anti-Unfair Competition Law.

The verdict in this case will play an exemplary role in regulating the operations of the video game industry, and it has caused huge repercussions in the computer game industry. The Shanghai Legal Daily (page A02/A03, February 2^nd, 2016) and the People’s Court Daily (page 3, February 6^th, 2016) devoted more than half of the related pages each to the “Six Major Schools” case by reporting in detail on case facts, the major issues in controversy and the final verdict. The news reports emphasized that in the current environment of significant homogenization of mobile gaming apps, a severe crackdown on “shanzhai” IP infringement is needed. Any party wishing to adapt an original means of expression included in another party’s work into a computer game must respect the copyrights in the original work.

It has become a new trend in the mobile game industry for mobile apps to cooperate with media such as film and television, literature and animation to attract fans by virtue of popular intellectual property. Even though mobile apps take up a large proportion of the computer game market nowadays, computer game creators who wish to adapt literary works into games must exercise prudence in order to respect the rights of the copyright holders .

W&B will continue employ its high-quality, top-notch legal services to assist both domestic and foreign enterprises in enforcing their IP rights.

Annex:

1. Link to report in the Shanghai Legal Daily: http://newspaper.jfdaily.com/shfzb/html/2016-02/02/content_170967.htm

2. Link to report in the People’s Court Daily: http://www.chinacourt.org/article/detail/2016/02/id/1805225.shtml

(The illustrations in this article were independently created by Huayun Wang of W&B’s Copyright & Trademark Litigation Department. Any reproduction must include the source.)