The Taipei District Court yesterday ruled against the Central Motion Picture Corp (CMPC) in a civil suit that involved the motion company violating the terms of a contract it signed with a law firm.
The ruling is not final and can be appealed.
In May 2007, the CMPC signed a one-year contract with a local law firm in which it agreed to pay the firm NT$3 million (US$100,000) for conducting research and drafting a report about legal issues surrounding CMPC's conflict with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) over long-term assets.
The CMPC, along with several other media companies, were owned by the KMT until 2005, when the party sold them to the China Times Group.
In March last year, one month before the contract expired, CMPC terminated it without the consent of the law firm, saying the legal counsels plagiarized their report from a similar report done by the Control Yuan.
CMPC said the lawyers copied a report published by the Control Yuan on the study of the KMT's assets, resulting in irreparable defects in the content of the report. It also filed a civil lawsuit demanding that the law firm return NT$3 million in legal fees, or that at least part of the legal fees should be waived.
The law firm denied plagiarizing the report, saying that the sources of information on topics such as the history of how the KMT came to possess the assets and the definition of its properties came from the same government agencies, so there were bound to be some similarities.
District court judges ruled against the plaintiff and stated in their ruling that CMPC violated the terms of the contract, which detailed that should the contract be terminated, CMPC was not entitled to a refund of the legal fees.
According to the terms of the contract, the CMPC should have demanded that the law firm revise the problems with the report instead of terminating the contract without the law firm's consent.
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