The Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) heard an online appeal of a copyright dispute involving computer software on April 21, the first of the eight cases the court is scheduled to hear online during this year’s week-long publicity campaign on intellectual property.

The dispute revolved around price control software running on the social messaging platform WeChat. The software copyright owner, Chengbei, a Guangzhou-based information technology provider, argued in the first trial by a lower court that a company named Weisika infringed upon its copyright by running another software that was similar to its product in terms of function and appearance. It sought an order directing Weisika to stop the infringement and claimed one million yuan ($141,301) in compensation.

The lower court held that the infringement was possible given the similarity of the two software products in function, layout and logo design. It said that Weisika bears the burden of proof that there is no substantial similarity between the source codes of the two software products, but the company rejected to apply for authentication. As a result, the court upheld Chengbei’s infringement claim and ordered Weisika to pay Chengbei 350,000 yuan in compensation

Weisika appealed to the IP Court which in its deliberations focused on four issues: whether Weisika had ever known and used Chengbei’s software, whether the lower court properly allocated the burden of proof, whether the compensation was appropriate and whether the sole shareholder of Weisika was jointly liable with the company.

This case, the result of which is still pending, touches on a range of common issues including the criteria for determining the infringement on computer software copyrights, the rules for software comparison and the allocation of the burden of proof. It will help to unify the rules for trying cases of this kind.

Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the IP Court drew on the SPC’s dedicated online platform to hear the case with the parties participating in the proceedings in Guangzhou.