Garfield, the famous cartoon cat, has won a copyright infringement dispute with a Chinese publishing company amid growing international concerns for intellectual property rights.
The Beijing No 2 Intermediate People's Court yesterday ordered a publishing house in North China's Shanxi Province to compensate PawsIncorporated, copyright owner of the cartoon character, Garfield, 213,800 yuan (25,000 US dollars) for copyright infringement.
"The American plaintiff is protected by the Copyright Law as China and the United States are both members of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works," the court said in its judgement.
However, the Chinese company, Taiyuan-based Hope Press, said it was innocent. "Hope Press signed an agreement with Paws through its agent company RM in 1998 to acquire the publishing rights of the Chinese version of Garfield stories," Liu Zhijun, the lawyer representing the publishing house, was quoted as saying by China Daily.
"Hope paid Paws 253,000 yuan (31,000 US dollars) for this," he said.
Tang Zhaozhi, representative of the plaintiff, said he was satisfied with the judgment. The US company categorically denied they had reached an agreement with Hope over rights to publish the Chinese version of Garfield.
"Since the American plaintiff denied there was a contract with the publishing house, the court rejected the defendant's claim that Paws had approved their publishing of Garfield," the chief judge, Liu Wei said in his ruling. PTI
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