A lawsuit filed by century-old Chinese publisher Zhonghua Book Co was recently dismissed after the court found it had sued the wrong company.
Zhonghua's suit against the maker of the Hanvon e-book reader was filed in 2009 claiming infringement of its copyright on the punctuated version of Twenty-Four Histories, one of four e-books Hanvon was selling.
The suit asked for more than 4 million yuan ($617,600) in compensation from Hanvon.
Twenty-Four Histories is a collection of books covering China from prehistory (about 2,500 BC) to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).
Hanvon told the court it bought the content from an online database of ancient Chinese books and paid a 400,000 yuan licensing fee to Beijing Guoxue Times Culture Co, the developer of the database.
The court found that Zhonghua had already served notice on Guoxue about the alleged infringement, but took no legal action against any company until Hanvon made it into an e-book.
As well, Hanvon was found free from fault by the court because it paid a reasonable fee to the database developer, which fulfilled its obligation of "proper care and review". It also stopped selling the disputed e-book after the lawsuit was filed.
Though Guoxue escaped the publisher's legal actions at the outset of the case, it was sued by Zhonghua in April.
Ren Haitao, legal adviser to Zhonghua, insisted that the e-book was also a publication and Hanvon should be considered "a publisher rather than just a digital document copier - so it must obey copyright law".
But Hanvon's attorney Lin Yue said ancient Chinese books should be in the public domain anyway.
"Our ancestors' legacy will be monopolized if the copyright of an ancient book is owned by a single publisher only because it made a punctuated version," Lin said.
The original books, like other ancient Chinese works, have no punctuation.
Industry insiders said the case exemplifies disputes that have emerged in recent years as digital copyrights pose new challenges for writers, publishers and website operators.
"Everyone has the right and desire to share in the richness of knowledge and digital publications meet their growing needs," said Yu Guoming, a professor of communications at Renmin University of China.
Yu called for more tolerance from the publishing companies.
"Ways to solve copyright disputes in the past are outdated," he said.
"A new solution can be found only with the negotiation of society, not just between a few publishers and technical operators," he said.
(Source:China Daily)
