Typos, missing chapters and pages, using inferior inks...... Shoddy pirated books infringe on the legitimate rights of intellectual property owners, which not only affects the reading experience, but also may endanger health.
Recently, Yangpu District, Shanghai
Peoples court
(hereinafter referred to as Yangpu District People's Court)
On this article about "New Concept English"
Copyright Infringement
In criminal cases, the first-instance verdict is to be pronounced in accordance with law
The two defendants were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from one year and three months to one year and nine months, and were also fined.
Wang Zhaohui, president of the Yangpu District People's Court, served as the presiding judge of the case, and Bai Yingxi, deputy chief procurator of the Yangpu District People's Procuratorate, appeared in court to support the prosecution. Some deputies to the people's congresses at the two levels in the urban area, members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, specially invited supervisors of the Yangpu District People's Court and representatives of enterprises were invited to participate in the hearing. Previously, the Yangpu District People's Court accepted a series of criminal cases involving infringement of the copyright of "New Concept English", and all of them have been concluded.
Replay of the case
Starting from 2022, Wang Moumou ordered an anti-counterfeiting mark with a counterfeit registered trademark with "PEARSON" from Chen, and entrusted Jin Moumou, a related party in the same case, to engrave the pirated "New Concept English" book CD, completing the "upstream link" of illegally manufacturing counterfeit anti-counterfeiting marks and engraving pirated CDs. Subsequently, Wang XX provided the above-mentioned auxiliary materials to Ye XX and Yang XX A and his wife, and successively entrusted Ye XX XX, defendant Yang XX B and others to print and bind.
Ye XX, Yang XX, and others hired defendant Li XX, co-defendants Jin XX, Yang XXC, and others to impose, print, bind, label, package, and ship the pirated version of "New Concept English" in a printing limited company that was actually operated, so as to reproduce and distribute the pirated version of "New Concept English". Wang then sold the above-mentioned copied books to Liang and others, and Liang and others, as "distributors", sold the pirated books to all parts of the country through online stores, realizing the integration of production and marketing. The above-mentioned personnel "perform their own duties" and form a complete criminal "industrial chain".
According to the judicial audit, from November 2022 to June 2023, the co-defendants Wang XX, Jin XX, Yang XX C, and defendant Li XX printed a total of more than 300,000 unauthorized copies of the "New Concept English" series of books. Between April 2023 and June of the same year, defendant Yang Mouyi printed more than 60,000 copies of the "New Concept English" series of books without authorization. The illegal profits of Liang and others, who are related to the same case, ranged from 20 to more than 60 yuan.
Court rulings
The "New Concept English" series of books involved in the case is a work protected by the Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China. In this case, for the purpose of making profits, without the permission of the copyright owner, he reproduced and distributed his written works and published books for which others enjoyed exclusive publishing rights, and there were other particularly serious circumstances, and his conduct constituted the crime of copyright infringement. At the same time, for the purpose of making profits, selling infringing copies that are known to infringe on the copyrights of others, and the amount of illegal gains is huge, and his conduct has constituted the crime of selling infringing copies.
The people's court sentenced Wang to three years and six months imprisonment and a fine of 300,000 yuan; Jin, Yang and Liang were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from one year to one year and six months, and fines ranging from 5,000 to 1,500,000 yuan. Suspended sentences are to be applied in accordance with law in circumstances such as the return of stolen goods. Unlawful gains are to be recovered, and the infringing books, semi-finished products, covers, printing templates, CDs, etc., as well as the property used in the crime, are to be confiscated.
As a literary work, the copyright of New Concept English is protected by law. Cracking down on piracy and protecting copyright is not only the protection of the rights of copyright holders, but also the only way to encourage creativity and promote innovation. On the contrary, if piracy is allowed to run rampant, it will have the consequence of "bad money driving out good money" in the market, and should be severely punished according to law.
In this series of cases, the unauthorized act of copying the books involved in the case and selling them directly infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of the relevant rights holders, and the subsequent sales are absorbed by the copying acts, which is a source crime severely cracked down on by the Criminal Law, and therefore constitutes the crime of copyright infringement.
Tips for identifying books
1. Genuine books are brightly colored, smooth in appearance, and firmly bound, while pirated books are disorderly in color, loosely bound, with raw edge pages, and easy to fall off pages.
2. The paper used for genuine books is of good quality, thickness and feel, while pirated books are often made of thin paper and rough paper;
3. The ink of genuine books exudes a fragrance, while pirated books often have a pungent smell due to the use of inferior printing ink;
4. The layout of genuine books is beautiful and the text is clear, while pirated books are mostly scanned without proofreading, so the typesetting error rate is high, and the text is blurry and overlapping;
5. Pirated books are often priced much lower than genuine books, and are often sold through informal channels.
Note: Pirated books are very harmful, with poor binding, typos and omissions, affecting and misleading readers' reading cognition, poor texture and blurry printing, which can easily cause visual fatigue among teenagers in the stage of vision development. Moreover, substandard paper, ink and glue seriously endanger the human health of readers.
The judge reminded: Please choose the official e-commerce self-operated online store of the publishing house or the regular physical bookstore to buy, and resist piracy from you and me!
Text/Image: Yang Fa
Editor: Zhou Mengzhen
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