On April 17, a lawsuit launched by Chinanews against Hithink Flush Information Network Co., Ltd. entered procedures at second instance at People’s Court in Binjiang district in Hangzhou city, Zhejiang province. Their dispute commenced in November 2012. Hithink was accused of illegally reproducing copyrighted materials fromchinanews.com and was required to stop infringing activities and pay damages.

Zhou Jianzhong, attorney of the plaintiff, claimed that since 2010 Hithink had reproduced a large number of protected articles published at chinanews.com without any consensus of the right holder and refused to stop the infringing activities after being requested for many times. According to Zhou, Hithink had illegally reprinted a total of ten thousand articles at chinanews.com, in which ten articles were selected to be the subjects at court.

The court accepted the case in December 2012 and rendered a sentence at first instance in March 2013, ruling that Hithink infringed the information network transmission right on involved articles of the plaintiff and ordering Hithink to stop infringing activities and pay damages thereof.

Pursuant to the sentence, the plaintiff could get damages ranging from 100 yuan to 500 yuan for every involved article, normally 200 yuan on average. However, this compensation standard was made on June 1, 1999 and the price level now has been significantly increasing, therefore the plaintiff appealed to a higher court, asking for more damages and a public apology by the defendant at media. The plaintiff hoped that the public awareness on copyright protection would be increased through the case.

At the first trial, the defendant proposed no objection to the accusation while during the recent court process, the attorney of the defendant just admitted that they only had infringed the rights of two of the ten articles. The defendant attributed the change to their confusion of the ten articles before. The two sides also had discrepancies on the approach used in notarizing the evidence on the web pages.

The case now is awaiting a determination by the higher court. 

(Source: IPR in China)