Tencent’s “Three Bodies” TV series is tentatively scheduled to air in September, directed by Yang Lei and starring Zhang Luyi, Yu Hewei, Chen Jin, Prince Wen, Lin Yongjian and Li Xiaoran in the lead roles, with 24 episodes.
In addition to the film and television rights, Tencent also enjoys the exclusive license to record The Three Bodies as an audio work.
A few days ago, the Shanghai Intellectual Property Court announced the results of a case concerning the maintenance of Tencent’s audio copyright of Three Bodies.
In 2019, Tencent filed a lawsuit with the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s Court after believing, through online forensics, that a large amount of audio content of “Three Bodies” uploaded by anchors existed in Litchi’s Litchi App.
The instrument shows that the plaintiff Tencent claimed that it signed an exclusive cooperation agreement with Liu Cixin, the author of the novel Three Bodies, in May 2016, and that Liu Cixin issued a letter of authorization in which the plaintiff enjoyed an exclusive license to record Three Bodies as an audio work.
The defendant Lychee provided a large number of unauthorized audiobooks for online listening, playing and caching through its website and “Lychee” application, which caused many Internet users to stop visiting the plaintiff’s website and downloading the plaintiff’s “Penguin FM” client. The Court of First Instance held that the defendant Lychee had infringed on the copyright of the plaintiff’s work in question.
The court of first instance held that the defendant Lychee infringed the plaintiff’s copyright and should bear the responsibility of stopping the infringement, eliminating the impact and compensating the damages.
Li Zhi Company argued that the exclusive license of the right to adapt “Three Bodies” into a radio drama was owned by Himalaya Company, and Liu Cixin did not authorize the right to webcast the work in question to Tencent, so it filed an appeal.
The court of second instance held that the first instance judgment found that the facts were clear and the applicable law was flawed but the verdict was correct, so the verdict rejected the appeal of Litchi and upheld the original verdict.
