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Oct 6, 2011
A group of mainland writers has filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of illegally distributing their books via applications available on its App Store and are demanding 6.5 million yuan (HK$7.90 million) in compensation for copyright violation.
The Writers' Rights Alliance, representing six authors, filed the case with the Beijing No2 Intermediate People's Court at the end of last month, accusing Apple's App Store of profiting by allowing applications to go online with 23 books without permission from the copyright owners. The best-selling authors include novelist and popular blogger Han Han, Murong Xuecun, Kong Ergou, Xiaoqiao Laoshu and He Ma.
Alliance spokesman Bei Zhicheng was quoted by China National Radio's website as saying that Apple's App Store does not respect intellectual property rights.
"It doesn't stop those applications containing pirated books during the upload reviewing process and profits from 30 per cent of the turnover," he said. "Some best-selling books have been downloaded about one million times, which caused a loss of millions of yuan [for one author]. As there are dozens of mainstream authors, Apple has caused about one billion yuan of losses to authors, publishers and online and offline bookstores."
Alliance employee Ding Yi was quoted as saying it was the first case involving a group of writers and it would file more lawsuits for more than 10 writers. "If Apple is not sincere about tackling this issue, we will try to file more lawsuits," Ding said.
The same group of authors successfully petitioned Baidu, China's largest internet search engine, to remove 2.8 million documents containing their material from Baidu Library in March. The alliance is representing 30 authors. One of them, Murong, accused Apple of "stealing money from our pockets".
Alliance lawyer Wang Guohua said the behaviour of Apple's App Store is more detrimental than Baidu Library's because Baidu provided the downloads for free while Apple receives commissions and does not stop the infringement during its review process before making applications available to the public.
"Baidu sometimes uses the safe harbour principle to defend itself, but that's hard to apply to Apple's App Store," Wang said. The principle says that websites should not be held legally accountable if they are unaware that others have uploaded pirated products online. After they are informed they have a responsibility to remove the offending content.
Apple Beijing's reply to his letter was dismissive, Wang said. "It doesn't seem like they are going to tackle the issue, so we filed the lawsuit," he said. They expect to be told next week whether the court will accept the case. Wang said users of the App Store, mostly white-collar workers, were unaware the electronic books they bought were pirated.
The issue of intellectual property rights on the mainland has led to trade friction between China and foreign firms, and now mainland authors are starting to defend their rights. Apple Beijing and the Beijing No2 Intermediate People's Court were not available for comment.
priscilla.jiao@scmp.com Copyright (c) 2011. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.