Reporter | Zhao Yunxian Edit | Jiang Yan
Many of the post-80s and post-90s childhoods in China have experiences with Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tale characters, which may be Shuk Beta, or Pippiru and Rusisi, and the monthly magazine "Fairy Tale King" has naturally become one of the carriers in their memories. Now, the magazine, which was founded in 1985 and is now 36 years old, has announced that it is about to cease publication, and its main author Zheng Yuanjie recently announced on Weibo that due to the characters in his works have been maliciously preemptively registered trademarks for many years, it is difficult to protect rights, and now with limited energy, they can only choose to stop creating, and "Fairy Tale King" will be suspended in January 2022.
A month ago, Zheng Yuanjie wrote in a Weibo article entitled "A Letter from Zheng Yuanjie to Three Trademarks" (hereinafter referred to as "A Letter"): "I want to say sorry to the millions of readers and friends who have supported the monthly magazine "Fairy Tale King" for 36 years, sorry that I have limited energy at the age of 66, and can only devote all my energy to fighting with the 7197328 Pipilu trademark, the 8229932 Fairy Tale King trademark, and the 5423972 Shuk trademark by stopping writing the monthly "Fairy Tale King" monthly magazine. He said that the combined time for the protection of these three trademarks is 32 years long, and this is only the tip of the iceberg of infringement, and there are 672 infringing trademarks to be protected. Zheng Yuanjie has repeatedly said that the bad faith preemptive registration of trademarks has greatly affected his writing. In an interview with the media in 2019, he talked about the failure of a large number of his new works to be released, that is, they could not be disturbed by infringement.
In addition to the bad faith trademark squatting, Zheng Yuanjie also suffered a lot of pirated book infringement, in 2007, Tianjin People's Fine Arts Publishing House did not authorize the publication of his fairy tale debut "Black and Black in Honesty Island", the incident ended with the editor personally taking responsibility and the publishing house not responding. However, Zheng Yuanjie said in a letter that similar piracy problems have improved in recent years, and China has made great progress in intellectual property protection, but there is still a lot of room for improvement in intellectual property protection in the field of trademarks.
In fact, this is not the first time that "Fairy Tale King" has been discontinued. In 2002, Zheng Yuanjie was named by CCTV to criticize the works as "full of inappropriate content for children", the use of words such as "hemorrhoids" and "menstruation" caused dissatisfaction among parents, and under the pressure of public opinion, "Ghost Car" stopped serialization, and it was not until July 2004 that "Fairy Tale King" re-published Zheng Yuanjie's new work.
Founded in 1985, "Fairy Tale King" has published 495 issues so far, with a total print run of more than 200 million copies, almost all created by Zheng Yuanjie, and his characters such as Pipilu, Rusisi, Shuk and Beta are well known to the Chinese. In A Letter, he said that he had gotten up at four o'clock every day for the past 36 years to write, and that "no day had been interrupted" that he had thought that nothing could hinder his writing, and that he had not thought that the bad-faith infringing trademark squatting had "done it."
Today, the news of the suspension of "Fairy Tale King" has aroused attention on the Internet, and many readers have thanked Zheng Yuanjie, calling it "childhood memories". Zheng Yuanjie hopes that readers can cheer for themselves by "respecting intellectual property rights, advocating originality, despising plagiarism, and staying away from businesses and goods that illegally profit through unfair competition."