Huge copyright dispute over panoramic view of the Forbidden City

In this copyright dispute case, the plaintiff Quan Mouke Company is a company specializing in the research and development of mobile Internet and virtual reality technologies. It has professional three-dimensional panoramic shooting technology and has created the “Forbidden City” VR series of panoramic photography works (hereinafter referred to as the works involved in the case) and registered the copyright with the Beijing Copyright Bureau.

The defendant and a certain company uploaded a total of 76 photographic works involved in this copyright dispute on the website they hosted (kuleiman.com) without permission.

The plaintiff claimed that the defendant’s actions violated his right to disseminate the works involved on the information network, so he filed a lawsuit with the court.

The court of first instance ruled that the defendant should compensate the plaintiff for economic losses and reasonable expenses of RMB 494,500. After the judgment of first instance was made, the defendant appealed. The court of second instance rejected the appeal and upheld the original judgment.

The court’s effective judgment held that the works in question were photographic works that could present objects and scenes in a 360-degree panoramic view and should be protected according to law.

The plaintiff submitted the electronic manuscript of the work in question, the work registration certificate and a printout of the plaintiff’s webpage displaying the work in question. The above evidence corroborates each other and can prove that the plaintiff enjoys the copyright of the work in question and has the right to file a lawsuit based on the copyright dispute.

Without permission, the defendant provided a 360-degree panoramic display of the works in question on the website it operated, allowing the public to obtain the works in question at a time and place of their own choice, infringing the plaintiff’s right to disseminate the works in question over the information network.

The image data of cultural relics in the collection formed in the digital construction of museums belong to the category of cultural relic data. For some movable and immovable cultural relics, if the photographic images contain the intellectual selection and judgment of the collector and have originality, they constitute photographic works stipulated in the China’s Copyright Law.

This case clarified the path for protecting original cultural relics and video materials in accordance with China’s Copyright Law, and has reference significance for the adjudication of cases in related fields.