Case brief:

In December 2020, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau cracked down on the country's first game copyright infringement case that uses transcoding in IOS, Android and PC systems. Two suspects were arrested and five hard disks and five network servers were seized, with the amount involved in the case totaling more than 2 million yuan ($297,769). 

Since 2018, defendant Xie Chenglong was found to have taken advantage of his professional knowledge and years of experience working for game development companies to develop a game engine program named "fly3d". This was suitable for ARPG games interconnecting IOS terminals, Android terminals and computer terminals. He also developed the program "Longtu Box", which was used to integrate multiple games into one platform. 

Without the authorization of "The Legend of MIR II" game rights company, Xie provided the game's maps, buildings, characters, props, monsters, special effects and other infringing game materials to a large number of users. He built and operated an infringing game and earned the recharges of the players as profits.

Xie also sold "fly3d" and "Longtu Box" to the other defendant Liu Xiaojing and helped more than 70 people to build infringing game servers and to obtain fixed monthly fees and top-up amounts.

On June 18 last year, the Third Intermediate People's Court of Shanghai sentenced the defendant Xie Chenglong to fixed-term imprisonment of three years and six months and fined him 1.05 million yuan for copyright infringement. The defendant Liu Xiaojing was sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for one year and fined 200,000 yuan.

Significance:

Online games are completely different audio-visual work. With no special legislation to protect them, this finding is deemed as an effective way to protect them by incorporating them into copyright law as a category of audio-visual work. This is believed to be conducive to providing the online games industry with intellectual property incentives, as well as boosting its prosperity.