Chinese Court Fines Apple For Copyright Violations

hackingbear writes "The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court ruled in favor of a group of Chinese authors, and Apple will have to pay them in excess of 730,000 yuan (US$118,000) for infringement. Apple had not gotten permission before selling their books on the Apple App Store, it noted. These cases were the second batch of lawsuits filed against Apple by the Writers' Right Protection Union, which includes prominent members like prolific blogger and novelist Han Han who have become a pop culture star through his creative and cynical writings criticizing the (Chinese) government."

Re:Hypocritical

[Chrisq]

Apple are hypocritical thieves, nothing more, nothing less.

Just a typical corporation then

Re:Hypocritical

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this on Apple? They're a store. Someone _ELSE_ sold a book through Apple that contained material that violated copyrights. Apple didn't produce the book. That's like blaming Barnes & Nobles if a book they sold violated copyright.

Apple haters will be Apple haters, making up bullshit reasons to hate.

Re:In other news...

[girlinatrainingbra]

and in other news, the USA chides other countries for human rights violations while we still operate Guantanamo...

well Apple did F**K up.

[leuk_he]

Somebody uploaded best-sellers to the store. It is like some john doe uploads the (chinese) Dan Brown books to iTunes, and apple get 30% of all the sales.

Too bad there are so many anti-chinese sentiments here. But this is really a case of chinese seaking part of apple making a boo boo.

Note that in AmericaN law would allow up to $150,000 per infringment, the chise case was for multiple infringements, but the article does not state how much.

Re:Hypocritical

[slacka]

Apple are hypocritical thieves, nothing more, nothing less.

The real Hypocrisy is the government and legal system of China. As someone who's lived in China. they have ZERO respect for IP laws. Just downstairs from my apt I had a better selection of western and Chinese pirated DVDs than blockbuster, DVD's of Movies that are still playing in the Cinema. I'd often see the local cops come in to BUY DVDs. This is not some backwards city. This is Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm talking about.

They only reason this law is being enforced is that it's Apple and the government is trying to "send a message". Any Chinese owned store, especially with Communist connections, these violations would be ignored.

Re:So...

[firex726]

Apple is not local to China.
Just because something was made in CHina, does not mean it was not done for a foreign company.

Re:Proven 100% wrong here.

[gauauu]

"As someone who's lived in China. they have ZERO respect for IP laws."

Since this entire case is about China respecting IP laws, your assertion is PROVEN wrong.

No, there's a difference between using IP laws when it's to your advantage, and actually "respecting" them.

Read all best-sellers and submissions completely

[tepples]

As I interpret what the judge said, Apple has the obligation to hire thousands of human reviewers, make all of them read every book that appears on a best-seller list from cover to cover, and then make one of them read each submitted book from cover to cover. An automated system to just buy and scan the best-sellers and search for substrings in submitted books would not catch submitted books that are paraphrases of a best-seller. I don't see how even a company as big as Apple can afford this much effort.