Walt Disney Co has won a copyright dispute over a Chinese knock-off of its animated movie Cars, a China court said yesterday, a rare victory for a foreign firm in a country famous for counterfeits.
Blue MTV (藍火焰影視動漫), which makes the Chinese cartoon the Autobots, and the film’s publisher have been ordered to stop their infringement of Disney’s copyrights, the Shanghai High People’s Court said in a statement posted on the Twitter-like Weibo.
The court also ordered the Chinese side to pay 1.35 million yuan (US$194,247) to Disney including compensation and legal fees, a microscopic sum for a company that opened a US$5.5 billion theme park in Shanghai in June.
Produced by Pixar Animation Studios Inc and released by Disney in 2006, the US film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
The court said the Autobots, released last year, took the design of key characters from the Cars series, including Lightning McQueen in the first film and Francesco Bernoulli in the sequel, violating the copyrights of Disney and Pixar.
The Chinese name for Autobots also has a similar sound and meaning to the translated title of the Disney film, it said, constituting “unfair competition.”
Intellectual property rights are a bone of contention between Western countries and China.
A Chinese court in May ruled against Apple Inc in a case it brought against a small maker of “iphone”-branded leather goods.
Earlier this month basketball megastar Michael Jordan won part of his trademark suit against a China-based sportswear company, following a years-long struggle for control over the rights to his Chinese name.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day