Legal Analysis on Conflict between Domain and Name Right According to Chinese Law, II

By Albert Chen

III. What are the user’s interests on the domain and fair reasons to the registration and using?

At present, the standard in practices to judge the user enjoys the interests on the domain is to determine whether there’s a connection between the user and the domain or the main part of the domain, and this connection involves the overlap or correspondence between the name, company name or trademark of the user and the domain.

Surely, it also comes to our attention that even there’s no overlap or correspondence as mentioned above, the interests on the domain of the user or a fair reason to the registration or using of the users could also be established when a domain has been operated for a long period and thereby accumulates the social reputation, like the 163. com of Netease and 360buy.com of Jingdong.

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Netease VS. Tencent: Copyright Conflict on News APP Design

Recently, the copyright battle on the APP design between Netease (NASDAQ: NTES) and Tencent (SEHK: 700), two major internet companies in China, has been widely reported by local medias, and today’s essay is the digest of the news report and the comments from us.

According to the news of Sina Tech on 12th April afternoon (note: the link is in Chinese), Netease stated its news app has been plagiarized by Rencent and demanded the latter to withdraw the infringing app. It’s also mentioned in Netease’s statement that the Tencent News App for iPhone 2.0 version plagiarizes the layout, comment page, picture page’s design, including the app function and the appearance design.

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Complaints from China IT Tycoon: Weak Protection over IPR Jeopardizes Industry Innovation

According to the report of Nandu Daily, Mr. Ding Lei, the CEO of NetEase (NASDAQ: NTES) and the representative of People’s Congress in China stated on the conference of Guangdong People’s Congress that despite the innovation could make customers more satisfied and bring more market share to the company, which is also the impetus to the company, it’s also haunted with the dilemma of “more innovation more suffering” due to the weak protection on IPR by the state.

According to Ding’s words, the lawsuit on the infringement against the company may last for years, therefore the proceeding may be a suffering to the company; moreover, the judged compensation may be very low even the infringed company wins the lawsuit. “Previously, Baidu stately posted the works of Han Han in its product Baidu Wenku, and why? The reason could only be the poor combat on the infringement”, said Mr. Ding.

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