The company of celebrity designer Demos Chiang (蔣友柏) was indicted yesterday for violating the Copyright Act (著作權法) after a painter claimed the company copied a design piece from his work.
Chiang said he would file a countersuit against the painter for making malicious accusations and intimidation.
Taipei prosecutors yesterday indicted Chiang’s company, Dem Inc, and Su Yi-man (蘇尹曼), one of the company’s designers.
Prosecutors said Su was in charge of designing pictures for a wedding cake box for Danby Food Industry Co in which Su designed a swimming golden fish for the box. Painter Chen Yueh-cheng (陳玥呈) found the picture very similar to his work, published in 2005, and filed a suit against the company and Su.
Taipei prosecutors said Su’s design idea was likely derived from Chen’s painting.
Chiang dismissed Chen’s claim at a press conference yesterday afternoon and described prosecutors as “cultural hooligans” hampering Taiwan’s creative and cultural industries by asking the defendant, rather than the plaintiff, to present evidence and ignoring the evidence they presented.
“What we didn’t do is what we did not do. I will not pay any compensation. I am going to file a countersuit against [the plaintiff] for making false charges and intimidation and ask him to pay compensation of NT$5 million [US$159,000] on each count,” said Chiang, a great-grandson of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
“In the beginning, Chen asked for NT$3 million in compensation and later increased that amount to NT$5 million. The prosecutors even urged me to close the case by paying him the compensation, saying that doing so could save administrative resources,” Chiang said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the