Copyright Infringement: the Dog's Fault?

Copyright Infringement: the Dog's Fault?

Li Dongtao

Keywords: copyright law, infringement, website, pets

The Facts

Again I must remind you that

A Dog’s Dog ---- A CAT’s A CAT

        This is a case about “Dog & Cat”.

The plaintiff and the defendant are .com companies.

In May 1999, after registering its domain name, the plaintiff signed a contract with the defendant. According to the contract, the defendant would provide the plaintiff 20M of disk storage space on its Internet server. In return, the plaintiff would pay the defendant a monthly usage fee.

The plaintiff used this disk space to establish a web site under its own domain name offering information on pets under the name “Information Harbor for Pets”. In this way, the plaintiff published copyrightable materials about pet food, pet medicine and pet marriages, etc.

In June 2000, the defendant also began to offer a column called “Pets” on its website. The contents of “Pets” were identical to those available on the plaintiff’s “Information Harbor for Pets”, included some mistakes. For example, there were two columns designed for dogs and cats misnamed Wang-wang Supermarket for Cats and Miao-miao Supermarket for Dogs. The right names should have been Wang-wang Supermarket for Dogs and Miao-miao Supermarket for Cats.

The only difference between the two pet information websites was the designation of web pages. Moreover, there was a logo “Old Editions” on the defendant’s web site providing a link with the plaintiff’s website.

The plaintiff sued the defendant for copyright infringement.

The defendant argued that the copyright infringement was not established because it was only a link, but it also deleted the identical contents on its web site quickly.

Analysis

The copyright infringement is established.

The storage space of an Internet server may be divided into different parts for different users. Each user can operate its part under a domain name and a URL independently from the server, which makes up for a lack of Internet servers online.

In this case, according to the contract concluded by the plaintiff and the defendant, it is clear the defendant received a monthly user’s fee, not the plaintiff’s copyright.

If the Internet server had been a newspaper, the plaintiff would have paid for space on one page to publish its own copyrightable materials; without the plaintiff’s permission, the defendant would have been unable to republish those copyrightable materials on another page(webpage).

In short, because of copyright infringement, the dog isn’t a dog, the cat isn’t a cat, that’s the defendant’s fault.

版权信息: © 2024 Li Dontao Copyright Reserved.（© 2024 李东涛 版权所有）