Qilu Network Lightning News April 16, 2019 This morning, the Jinan Intermediate People's Court released the top ten intellectual property infringement cases in 2019, including the copyright case of "Little Drama Bone" art works.
On December 13, 2016, Zhou registered the fine art work "Little Drama Bone" with the National Copyright Administration, and the time of completion of the creation stated in the work registration certificate was first published on October 30, 2015. Xiaoju Bone Company is a wholly-owned company controlled by Hunan TV Drama Channel. On October 18, 2017, the company also registered the fine art work "Small Drama Bone Brand Pattern" at the Hunan Provincial Copyright Bureau, and the creation completion time stated in the work registration certificate was August 8, 2016, and the first publication time was September 8, 2017.
In June 2015, Hunan TV Drama Channel opened the "Little Drama Bone" column, which used the small drama bone logo, and successively filmed "Liu Sanjie", "White Haired Girl", "White Snake Legend" and other works. The earliest upload times for its WeChat public account and official Weibo using the Xiaoxiao Bone logo were September 6, 2016 and October 6, 2016, respectively. Zhou believes that the behavior of Hunan TV Drama Channel and Xiaoju Bone Company infringed on the right to disseminate information networks of his art works. The two defendants argued that the small drama bone logo they used had been created and published before the plaintiff registered the copyright, and the infringement facts claimed by the plaintiff were not established. In order to prove the completion time of the creation of their respective works, Zhou provided the manuscripts and electronic documents of the draft works and materials on March 17, 2015 and May 6, 2015, respectively, and the small drama bone company also provided the creation of the manuscript and creative description.
The plaintiff's mere certificate of registration of the work was not sufficient to prove the authenticity of the time of completion of its creation and the time of its first publication. Although the creative manuscripts and electronic documents supplemented by the plaintiff show the time of payment and the time of document formation, the above-mentioned times may be modified by themselves, and the existing evidence is difficult to determine the completion time of the creation of the works involved in the case. The WeChat, Weibo and online news reports provided by Xiaoju Bone Company can confirm that the allegedly infringing work has been published and that the publication time is earlier than the registration time of the plaintiff's work. Moreover, the defendant XiaoXiao Bone Company engaged in the cultural business activities of the "XiaoXiao Bone" program, and had the motivation and market demand to create the Xiaoxiao Bone logo. Comparing the evidentiary advantages of the two parties, the plaintiff claimed that the evidence of the defendant's infringement of the right to disseminate the information network of his works was not sufficient, and he should bear the legal consequences of failing to adduce evidence. The judgment rejected plaintiff Zhou's litigation claims.
This case involves the issue of the standard of proof for the time of formation and publication of the work. China implements a voluntary copyright registration system, and the copyright department does not conduct substantive examination of the registered content, so the information such as the completion time of creation and the time of first publication recorded on the copyright registration certificate must be supported by other evidence to determine its authenticity. For electronic documents that create works, since the creation and modification time in their properties can be modified by modifying the system time, it is not enough to prove its true formation time. In this case, under the circumstance that the creation completion time of the works of both parties could not be confirmed, according to the rules of evidence superiority, the review of the time of publication of the works was taken as a breakthrough, and this was used as the basis for judging the order of the completion time of the works.
Lightning News reporter Lang Kun Ma Mengmeng reported