Attorney-at-law for Plaintiff in the First and Second Instances: Liu Ping
 
Case Summary:
Since the turn of the 21 century, with the rapid development of internet application and technology, the mode of copyright infringement of music works has become Internet-based rapidly. It has become a fashion for netizens to acquire music works from the Internet. All major websites competed in setting up music download or linking services to increase their click rates, which gave rise to the phenomenon of copyright infringement by the dissemination of music works through the network and made an unprecedented impact to the interests of the owners of these works. However, the law lagging behind technical development increased the difficulty of copyright protection by copyright owners.
 
This case, an unprecedented classical case in the special historical period, provided a practical basis in terms of judicial theory for the trial of relevant cases and the formulation of relevant network dissemination regulations afterwards.
 
Plaintiff Sony Music (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd. filed a civil lawsuit against defendant Beijing Century Yuebo Co., Ltd. in 2004, claiming that the defendant had disseminated without permission the sound recordings produced by the plaintiff by way of deep link on the website www.chinamp3.com operated by the defendant, and had infringed upon the plaintiff’s copyright of the sound recordings. The plaintiff asked the court to order the defendant to stop the infringing act of network dissemination of songs involved in this case and downloading services and compensate for the huge amount of economic losses caused to the plaintiff thereby.
 
Beijing No.1 Intermediate People’s Court accepted this case and ruled: the defendant was at subjective fault in its act of setting up deep links without the permission of the plaintiff and for its business purpose of disseminating to the public through the Internet the music works to which the plaintiff had copyright, and had caused damage to the plaintiff’s rights, which constituted an infringement to the plaintiff’s rights. The defendant shall be subject to such civil liabilities as stopping infringement, compensating for the damages, etc. The defendant argued that its act did not constitute an infringement and it should not undertake legal liabilities since it only provided network links without data exchange with its servers and there were no reproduced works in its servers. Such reasons for the argument were not tenable and were not supported by this court.
 
The defendant refused to comply with the civil judgment of Beijing No.1 Intermediate People’s Court and appealed to Beijing Higher People’s Court.
 
In December 2005, Beijing Higher People’s Court rendered a final judgment (G M Zh Z No.714 [2004]), rejecting the appeal of Beijing Century Yuebo Co., Ltd. and upholding the original judgment.