Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com October 25 news, October 24, Dou Weiwei and Microsoft (China) Co., Ltd. copyright ownership, infringement dispute judgment of the first instance was made public.

According to the document, plaintiff Dou Weiwei alleges that emoji is a symbol art licensing project created and named in 1998 for China, Japan and the United States, with prior rights and interests related to emoticons and animation characters. Without written authorization, the defendant Microsoft, through its Wechat account "Microsoft Xiaona", has for a long time published secondary virtual characters with bad metaphors attached to the original emoji works, and spread cult animation illegal works, etc., which is an act of malicious infringement of the copyright of emoji virtual characters. Microsoft argues that emoji and its combination are common domain content, that Dou Weiwei is not the creator of emoji, and that the registered content of his claim should not be protected by copyright law.

CTOnews.com was informed that the court held that, according to the original and told argument, the focus of the dispute in this case was whether the content claimed by the plaintiff constituted a work under copyright law and whether the defendant's actions infringed upon the plaintiff's copyright.

Article 3 of the copyright Law of the people's Republic of China stipulates that the works referred to in this Law refer to intellectual achievements that are original and can be expressed in a certain form in the fields of literature, art and science. Whether the object involved in the case claimed by the plaintiff can constitute a work protected by copyright law is a prerequisite for judging whether the plaintiff has the right to bring a lawsuit in this case and whether the defendant is infringing. The plaintiff holds that the shape of the 14-line character set after the text of "emoji" constitutes a work of art. in the works of art, the eyes are expressed in circles, the mouth is represented by Omega symbols, the face is expressed in parentheses, and some expressions show eyebrows and other features, which is the content of its original expression. The defendant's tort content is substantially similar to that of the defendant. According to the plaintiff's claim and the evidence on record, the court's analysis as to whether the object of the right claimed by the plaintiff should be protected by the copyright law is as follows:

About the fourteen lines in the article in the form of a character set. According to the plaintiff's claim, the plaintiff believes that this part of the content is set as a figure as a whole, a single-line illustration composed of a virtual character and a work of art in the form of characters, and that it is original for the facial expression of the character, that is, the eyes are expressed in circles, the mouth is represented by Omega symbols, the face is expressed in parentheses, and some expressions are original in the expression of eyebrows and other features. Article 4 of the regulations on the implementation of the copyright Law of the people's Republic of China stipulates that works of art refer to painting, calligraphy, sculpture and other plane or three-dimensional plastic works of aesthetic significance composed of lines, colors or other means. According to this article, the object that constitutes an art work not only meets the requirements of the copyright law on the composition of the work, it also needs to conform to the characteristics of plastic art works that are composed of lines, colors or other ways, have aesthetic significance and belong to plane or three-dimensional in order to be protected by the copyright law. In this regard, the court held that the "emoji" claimed by the plaintiff in the form of a character set is a combination of characters (Chinese characters, Japanese, Korean, etc.), letters, punctuation, other characters, etc. a new type of text expression that artificially gives it another meaning. From the content of the 14-line character set claimed by the plaintiff, its function is an example of the idea expressed in the text, and from the creative logic, it should be the plot conception and content expression of "hide-and-seek" story. then the graphics in the form of the character set are made according to the specific expression of the story, so the text part is hidden. It is almost impossible for the general public to understand the thoughts and feelings that the creator wants to express from the fourteen-line characters arranged in turn, can not reflect the choice and judgment of the creator's intelligence, and from the point of view of the identification of works of art, nor can it reflect the creator's unique creativity and ideas in the field of aesthetics. According to law, the content of the fourteen-line character set advocated by the academy can not constitute the art works protected by copyright law. About the originality of the facial expressions of the characters in the above character set claimed by the plaintiff.

In this regard, the court held that, on the one hand, according to the evidence on record, the way of using various forms of characters and combining them to express certain emotions or meaning appeared on the Internet earlier than the plaintiff claimed that his creation of "emoji" was involved in the case. On the other hand, with the popularity of the Internet, computer-based ideographic creation based on computer characters is becoming more and more common. using parentheses to represent faces, circles to represent eyes, two dots or prime eyebrows, and common letters to represent mouth has become a common way to describe the facial features of characters, and from the several facial expressions claimed by the plaintiff involved in the case The expression of human face using the above commonly used computer characters is very limited and should not be monopolized by someone, so the court holds that the facial expressions claimed by the plaintiff do not constitute works of art and are protected by copyright law. To sum up, the works claimed by the plaintiff are not original, and their claims are lack of factual and legal basis, and the court does not support them. In the end, the court ruled to reject Dou Weiwei's claim.

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