Douyin's "window cut scissors" was sentenced to 200,000 yuan for plagiarism
The court held that the expression of "window cuts" should be protected by the "Copyright Law"
A few days ago, the Hangzhou Internet Court ruled that the special effects props for plagiarizing Douyin's "window cut scissors" were removed from the shelves, and the plagiarizing party compensated Douyin 200,000 yuan.
The special effects props involved in this case are the “window cuts”, one of the ten most popular special effects of Douyin in 2021. After Douyin went live on February 4, it was widely promoted at the Hunan TV’s New Year’s Eve Spring Festival Gala. Main Twitter special effects for the Spring Festival in the Year of the Yin Niu.
Its main function is to provide window scenes and red paper pages. By identifying the trajectory of the tip of the user's nose, the effect of the user using the tip of the nose as scissors to "cut" the window grilles on the screen is dynamically presented.
About 10 days after "window cuts and cuts" went online, Douyin found that a short video platform appeared very similar to cut window cuts and special effects, and took the platform to court.
Douyin believes that the special effects of "window cuts" constitute audio-visual works, and the defendant's plagiarism infringes the copyright of Douyin; however, the defendant maintains that the design belongs to the category of ideas and is not protected by the Copyright Law.
After the trial, the Hangzhou Internet Court held that cut and paste window grilles are concepts and belong to the category of ideology, but how to display cut and paste grilles can be concretely expressed.
In this case, the contextual settings of the "window cuts" included the steps and content of "nose tip recognition and positioning", "nose tip trace copying", "paper selection", "scene setting" and "expanding method", which reflected the producer's setting, Representational creation of element creation, picture cohesion, etc.
This way of expression is an original expression of the idea of cutting window grilles and should be protected by the Copyright Law.
The court held that although the appearance of the defendant's special effects props was different from that of "window cuts", the overall display process and element content were highly similar, which was difficult to explain by coincidence.
Therefore, the court finally found that the two constitutions were substantially similar, and sentenced the defendant to bear tort liability.
According to the relevant legal affairs of Douyin, as of the time of the prosecution, the number of users of the special effects of "window cut scissors" exceeded 26 million, and the cumulative number of videos on the most popular topic exceeded 1.19 billion times.
The aforementioned legal affairs stated that this is the first time that a domestic court has determined that "short video effects" should be protected by the Copyright Law, and established judicial standards for the ownership and originality of "human-computer interaction generated content".
The judgment of this case has typical exemplary significance for curbing plagiarism and malicious follow-up short video special effects, and protecting new intellectual property rights and innovations in the industry.
Text/Reporter Wen Jing