On April 23, the Chinese Character Style Association and relevant companies held a conference in Beijing, calling for modifying relevant articles of the Copyright Law (draft) in order to get computer typefaces and Chinese character styles protected by the law. The proposal has led to a lot of discussions among insiders of the industry. A deputy inspector of the Department of Laws and Regulations under the General Administration of Press and Publication of China Gao Si attended the conference and listened to the suggestions.
Industry of Chinese character styles is facing dangers?
As the intellectual property right is playing a more important role in the international economic competition, the industry of Chinese character styles has also realized the importance of protecting intellectual property rights.
People usually do not know the differences of the three concepts of the Chinese character, Chinese character style and computer typeface and generally believe that the Chinese character style is a public property invented and left over by our ancestors. The public also does not know much about the operation mode of the industry of Chinese character styles.
Piracies of Chinese character styles are very serious in China. China also does not have enough articles of laws to protect newly emerged subjects such as the computer typeface of Chinese characters, and different courts usually have different or even inconsistent judgments on a computer typeface infringement case.
In the case of the Beijing Founder Electronics accusing the Procter and Gamble for the Chinese character style infringement of the two Chinese characters “Piao Rou” between 2008 and 2011, the No. 1 Intermediate People's Court of Beijing rejected the Founder Electronics' appeal in the final judgment. The court neither supported nor opposed the focal viewpoint of the two Chinese characters of “Piao Rou” having the fine arts copyright and just evaded question that “whether the computer typeface of a Chinese character has the fine arts copyright or not,” which is a sensitive and core question that has puzzled the legal profession for a long period.
Due to many factors, the industry of Chinese character styles, which was once very prosperous, is gradually regressing. Currently, there are only a few relatively-large Chinese character style design companies in China, and business situations of most of them are not very good. According to a survey in 2011, other countries and regions using Chinese characters, including Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, all have companies that develop computer typefaces of Chinese characters. Japan has developed 2,973 Chinese character styles, Taiwan has developed 296 styles, and Hong Kong has developed 106 styles. However, the Chinese mainland, as the largest region using Chinese characters, has developed only 421 styles, far less than these of Japan.
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