Why does Huawei have to claim 20 million yuan, based on the fact that it is supported by the court?
Editor’s note: The author of this article You Yunting | Shanghai Dabang Senior Partner of Law Firm, Intellectual Property Lawyer .
Recently, the listed company Voice Holdings (hereinafter referred to as “Radio”) released Announcement stated that the company and five affiliated companies were sued by Huawei for photo infringement, demanding that the infringement, apology and compensation be compensated for 20 million yuan. The case was soon to be listed due to the receipt of the complaint, so the case has aroused great concern in the industry. In fact, the case used Huawei to take a picture, actually claimed 20 million yuan, so that professional picture rights activists visually dwarfed China. Today, this article talks about why Huawei has to claim 20 million yuan, based on whether it is 啥 and whether it will be obtained. Court support?
The announcement summarizes the Huawei complaint in the announcement, which is the case of the case: Huawei is the copyright owner of the “Pearl Aurora Pearl Theme Wallpaper” art work, and Huawei found that the music was adapted for the sound development after the art work was adapted. The two mobile phone operating system preset wallpapers, and use the wallpaper in the publicity of the conference, webpage display, advertisements, etc., infringing Huawei’s personal rights to the authorship and modification rights of the works. Therefore, the court was required to order the transmission to stop the infringement, compensate for the loss, apologize, and bear the legal costs.
1. Why is Huawei’s image claim so much higher than Visual China?
The claim for a single photo in this case is 20 million yuan, which should also subvert the public’s cognition. In the recent Chinese domestic visual rights disputes, the professional picture rights activist such as Visual China claimed 10,000 yuan. It has already been counted as a high price, and has been criticized by various media as a blatant extortion. The actual amount of compensation for the rights of such professional photo dealers is generally between several hundred yuan and 3,000 yuan, and most of them are 1,000 yuan. Why are visual Chinese pictures so worthless, and Huawei’s pictures are so valuable?
In fact, the difference between the lawsuit for mass rights protection and the lawsuit in this case is still not small. Shanghai Second Intermediate School has a Report mentioned that most of the objects of mass rights protection are ordinary social operators and even It is the bottom-level operator, the legal consciousness is weak, and the compensation ability is weak. Therefore, the court judgment should consider the social influence and the impact on the life of the defenders. The mass rights protection will also involve the overall profitability of the industry, such as Internet cafes and karaoke. In rights defending cases, defenders are often the upstream copyright parties, and the amount of compensation directly affects the distribution of interests between the upstream and downstream. The courts generally give a balanced guide price after careful weighing. In this case, the original defendant has a mobile phone sales in China. First, an African sales first, the case clearly has a background of market competition, the commercial interests involved are also large, so the high claims can also be understood.
Second, Huawei claims 20 million, what is the possible basis?
About the case, in addition to the announcement of the company, there is not much information on the Internet at present. However, if Huawei wants to file a high-value claim in this case, it must prove to the court the reasonableness of the claim of 20 million yuan. . The author studied the contents of the Huawei complaint in the announcement of the announcement, and speculated that the basis of the claim may be related to the use of the picture in the announcement. The copyright of the picture in question belongs to Huawei, but it has been adapted into a variety of mobile phones as a wallpaper after being adapted, and even used as a boot screen, and used on the box.
If the contents of the Huawei complaint are true, the nature of the infringement in this case will indeed be much worse than the general infringement case. Huawei can request that each infringement be classified into infringement amounts and then accumulate. For example, like a patent, the amount of mobile phone license for a single built-in wallpaper can be multiplied by the number of mobile phones shipped; the image of the mobile phone box containing the wallpaper can also be multiplied by the amount of the package for the amount of the single image; On the use of the picture, a higher amount is claimed for each release. The sound is currently on the market, so the sales volume of their mobile phones should have a prospectus, so it is not difficult to calculate 20 million yuan in this calculation method.
3. How does the court handle similar cases?
How does the plaintiff claim that rights are one thing, and how the court judges another is another matter. Let’s take a look at a similar case 10 years ago: Peking University Founder Company sued World of Warcraft game developer Blizzard and domestic operations. The case of the ninth city company infringing the copyright of the font. The case was that Peking University found that the World of Warcraft game packaged the fonts of the four Founder copyrights into the game client without authorization, and then sued the court for a claim of 100 million.
Warcraft World Founder font case, the sales price of Founder single font is hundreds of yuan, World of Warcraft has more than 1 million users in China. The common point of this case and Huawei’s prosecution of the case is that it is unlicensed. Put othersCopyrighted works are packaged in their own products, and thousands of copies are copied and distributed. However, the final judgment of the Supreme People’s Court was somewhat unexpected. Only the defendant was ordered to compensate the Founder Company for 2 million yuan.
The Supreme Court stated in judgment: the library involved The font is not the purpose of the relevant game player to choose to purchase the game client software and related patches. There is no direct causal relationship between the game operation income and the use of the library in the game. Therefore, Peking University Founder Company determined the compensation amount of the case by the operating income of the game and the amount of the online game “World of Warcraft” client software sold or by multiplying the unit price of each font in the Founder Lanting font. The court does not support the fact that there is no factual or legal basis.
If the logic in the above judgment is pushed to Huawei for the case of voice transmission, the wallpaper is obviously not the purpose of the mobile phone user to choose to buy the mobile phone. There is no direct causal relationship between the sales price and sales volume of the mobile phone and whether or not to use the wallpaper involved, so Huawei must The amount of wallpaper infringement compensation is related to the sales revenue of the mobile phone, or it is difficult to support the court based on the sales volume of the mobile phone using Huawei wallpaper.
Finally, Huawei’s lawsuit against sky-high compensation may still be related to slamming competitors’ listings, but the court’s decision must be based on fair and reasonable standards. As the author who has no business relationship with Huawei and the voice, I believe that according to the case of the case, it is fair to calculate the compensation amount by reference to the license fee. Each mobile phone has a wallpaper, so the mobile phone industry’s authorization for wallpaper is generally accepted by the industry. If the audio is not authorized, it should be compensated according to several times the price generally recognized by the industry. The specific multiple is determined by the court based on the nature of the infringement.