{"id":19784,"date":"2012-04-13T18:11:29","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T10:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinahearsay.com\/?p=12650"},"modified":"2012-04-13T18:11:29","modified_gmt":"2012-04-13T10:11:29","slug":"netease-vs-tencent-the-great-app-theft-of-2012-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/2012\/04\/13\/netease-vs-tencent-the-great-app-theft-of-2012-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Netease vs. Tencent: The Great App Theft of 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an interesting IP dispute, involving the copyright to the design of an iPhone application. Nifty. We’re talking here about a news app, so the underlying content is not at issue, but rather the packaging or design of the application that presents that content to the user.<\/p>\n

Check out the comparison (if you’re reading a re-post without images, click here for the original<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Looks pretty close to me, and Netease has also complained about the look of the comments page and certain other elements. On a statement published on the Netease website, they said:<\/p>\n

NetEase\u00a0strongly\u00a0condemns\u00a0hooliganism\u00a0of\u00a0Tencent\u00a0and\u00a0demands\u00a0Tencent\u00a0withdraw\u00a0it\u00a0from the\u00a0App\u00a0Store.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one appreciates hooliganism, aside from some football fans in the British Isles.<\/p>\n

You might be thinking this one is a slam dunk based on the above image. Not so fast. There are differences here with icons, heading content, and even color. And remember that this is an iPhone app — there simply aren’t that many options for a news app, which is why a lot of these end up looking similar.<\/p>\n

Is this copyright infringement and would Netease win if they took this to court? I don’t think it’s as easy as it looks at first glance.<\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a9 Stan for China Hearsay<\/a>, 2012. |\nPermalink<\/a> |\n2 comments<\/a> |\nAdd to\ndel.icio.us<\/a>\n\nPost tags: copyright infringement<\/a>, NetEase<\/a>, Tencent<\/a>\n<\/small><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think this infringement dispute might be slightly more complicated than you might think from the side-by-side comparison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[199,225,607,194,55],"tags":[7784,3162,7765],"class_list":["post-19784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright-infringement","category-intellectual-property","category-netease","category-news-chinese-law","category-tencent","tag-copyright-infringement","tag-netease-2","tag-tencent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}