The movie "The Richest Man in Xihong City" not only sent Shen Teng to the altar of ten billion male gods, but also achieved the rocket girl group. The box office exceeded 100 million in half a day, the box office on the first day exceeded 227 million, and the daily box office in the next two days exceeded 300 million, and the box office and theatrical scheduling were far more than the films in the same period, and the final box office was 2.548 billion, setting a record for the highest record of happy twist films, and even known as "national-level films".
However, the high-grossing film has also fallen into the vortex of infringement. "'The Richest Man in Xihong City' plagiarized my 2015 work to become the richest man, is it important to dream or money to be important?" In August 2018, an article published on the "Coccyx Say" public account immediately caused a heated discussion. Screenwriter Wang Qian said that there are a lot of similarities or similarities between the movie "The Richest Man in Xihong" and her own works in terms of the main character relationships and storylines.
In 2019, screenwriter Wang Qian sued the producer of the movie "The Richest Man in Xihong" to the court on the grounds of copyright infringement. The three companies involved in the infringement were Xihong Film and Television Culture (Tianjin) Co., Ltd., which was established in April 2016 by screenwriter and director Yan Fei, and the second was Star Festival Pictures (Beijing) Co., Ltd., and Beijing Happy Twist Film Co., Ltd. ranked third. It is reported that the production cost of the film is only 40 million, counting the total cost of publicity and other expenses of about 150 million, according to the proportion of the film can be divided into 9.21, deducting the cost of the film side net income of about 771 million.
During the trial, the plaintiff, Ms. Wang, argued that "The Richest Man in Xihong" had a lot of similarities with the script of "Heirs" in terms of character settings, special events, special scenes and the reversal plot of the ending. Ms. Wang said she had sent her script to Lin Moubao, one of the appellees, via WeChat. However, Ms. Wang was unable to produce evidence related to this.
In response to Ms. Wang's appeal, the lawyers representing the 6 defendants said that "The Richest Man in Xihong" was independently created and adapted from the movie "Brewster's Million Windfall" based on legal authorization, and the character relationship and core storyline had legal adaptation sources. Regarding the screenwriter of "Lin Moubao" pointed out by Ms. Wang, the defendant's lawyer argued that according to Lin Moubao, the two entered the crew one after another in an earlier play and did not know each other.
After trial, the court of first instance held that the films involved in the case were not the same as Ms. Wang's works in specific expressions, and that Ms. Wang did not raise the possibility of actual contact or contact between the six defendants, and rejected Ms. Wang's claims in the first instance. Ms. Wang was not satisfied and chose to appeal.
At 2:00 p.m. on March 18, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court formed a collegial panel to hear the alleged copyright infringement case of "The Richest Man in Xihong City". After a two-hour trial, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court did not pronounce a judgment at the court and will choose a date to make a judgment. At the same time, the plaintiffs indicated that there was no will to settle. The case received widespread attention and once topped weibo's hot search list.
The internationally recognized formula for the determination of infringing works has long been: "contact + substantial similarity", if the author of the allegedly infringing work has been in contact with or may have been in contact with the plaintiff's work protected by the Copyright Law, and the alleged infringing work is substantially similar in content to the plaintiff's work, it can be determined to be an infringing work unless there are statutory defenses such as fair use.
In fact, in the widely discussed topic of infringement of literary and artistic works, many issues are difficult to find a black and white boundary. At the end of the second-instance trial, the presiding judge also said that the whole case may be due to different understandings of the law, which led to different views of the two sides. Netizens have mixed opinions about this, what do you think?