Recently, the case of "Lepin" counterfeiting "Lego" involving a total amount of more than 330 million yuan was finalized in the Shanghai Higher People's Court. The court rejected the appeal of Li Haipeng and others and upheld the original judgment.
According to the original sentence, Li Haipeng was sentenced to 6 years in prison and a fine of 90 million yuan for copyright infringement; the other eight defendants were sentenced to 4 years and 6 months to 3 years in prison, and were subject to corresponding fines.
huge piracy infringement case
Since 2015, a "Lepin" toy that is almost exactly the same as "Lepin" building blocks appeared on the market. From product packaging, instruction manuals to building blocks themselves, they are highly replicated internationally renowned Lego building blocks.
But Lepin's price is only 30% or 40% of Lego's, which quickly became popular in the market. On an e-commerce platform, a Lepin building block dealer's annual sales reached 20 million yuan.
This has also attracted the attention of intellectual property supervision and investigative agencies. The Shanghai public security organs filed an investigation into the case on suspicion of copyright infringement, and the Ministry of Public Security also supervised the case.
The counterfeit gang also has certain means of concealing. The manufacturer printed on the packaging box of Lepin Building Blocks is called Longjun Toy Factory, Chenghai District, Shantou City. However, after on-site investigation, the investigative agency found that the main den of the counterfeit toys was hidden in three other toy factories in Shantou City.
The second-instance ruling in the case reads that since 2015, Li Haipeng instructed other defendants to purchase new Lego series toys and began to copy Lego toys through disassembly and research. In January 2015, Li Haipeng instructed others to register the Lepin Toy Factory in his personal name (later changed to Lihao Toy Factory, cancelled in July 2016), and carried out 1:1 replica of Lego toys design, mold opening and production in the factory, packing the finished products at Zhili Packaging Factory, and warehousing at the Xiaoju Dome Toy Factory.
On April 23, 2019, the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau seized 88 injection molds for copying Lego toys, 68 spare parts for assembling molds, 289,411 various packaging boxes of Lepin toys, 175,141 various instruction manuals of Lepin toys, more than 50,000 sales and shipment orders with the words "Shantou Lepin Toy Co., Ltd.", and 603,875 related computers, mobile phones, and Lepin toy products for copying Lego series.
After judicial accounting appraisal, from September 11, 2017 to April 23, 2019, Li Haipeng and others produced and sold 4249,255 boxes of infringing products, involving 634 models, totaling more than RMB 300 million. The number of infringing products to be seized for sale was 603,875 boxes, worth more than 30 million yuan.
On September 2, 2020, the Shanghai Third Intermediate People's Court held that Li Haipeng and nine others copied and distributed art works that Lego Company enjoyed copyright without the permission of the copyright owner for the purpose of making profits. The circumstances were particularly serious, and their actions constituted the crime of copyright infringement. Li Haipeng was sentenced to six years in prison and fined RMB 90 million.
Who copied Lego?
Li Haipeng was born in 1991 and should have a bright career prospect. According to Qixinbao information, Li Haipeng was the legal representative and shareholder of Guangdong Meizhizhijiao Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Meizhi Company"). The indictment obtained by a reporter from 21st Century Business Herald shows that he was also the actual operation director of Meizhi Company.
Meizhi Company is a leading enterprise in Shantou City, a gathering place for toy manufacturing. Its official website information shows that it owns multiple original brands, the company has more than 300 patents, and a total of more than 100 copyrights of software and original types.
In 2015, Meizhi Company held its first annual marketing summit, and the on-site orders exceeded 100 million yuan. But it was also from this year that Li Haipeng began his journey to copying Lego.
The second instance of the case was put into trouble, but a question still lingers, that is, who copied Lego?
In the second instance, an appellant filed a complainant that this case was a crime committed by a company in the United States and employees should not be held accountable.
The court held that this case did not belong to a unit crime committed by Meizhi Company, but a joint crime committed by Li Haipeng and others.The ruling reads that from the perspective of production and sales, although the appellant Li Haipeng serves as the main person in charge of Meizhi Company and it is up to him to replicate Lego toys, the Lepin toys that reproduce Lego toys are mainly produced by Lihao Toy Factory and sold to the public in the name of Longjun Toy Factory, rather than production and sales in the name of Meizhi Company. Judging from the bank account details, the income and expenditure of the production and sale of Lepin Toys are in and out through personal accounts. The account amount is used to pay to individuals and withdraw in cash. There is no financial transaction with Meizhi Company, and the relevant illegal income does not belong to Meizhi Company, so Meizhi Company is not the subject of the crime in this case.
However, before the trial of this case, Lego had filed a civil lawsuit against Meizhi Company and its affiliated companies on the grounds of copyright infringement and unfair competition. The Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court made a second-instance judgment on December 10, 2019, determining that Meizhi Company and its affiliated companies are the producers, operators and sellers of Lepin Building Blocks, and compensated Lego RMB 4.7 million.
Judicial organs crack down on infringement and piracy through criminal cases and civil cases, and protect intellectual property rights, it is inevitable that people wonder why civil cases believe that Meizhi Company has copied Lego, but criminal cases believe that it is not Meizhi Company but Li Haipeng and other individuals who have committed the copycat?
Legal experts believe that in fact, this is caused by different evidence proof standards in criminal proceedings and civil proceedings. "Criminal cases directly involve the conviction and sentencing of the defendant, so the standards for evidence proof are extremely high, but civil proceedings require that the evidence be determined to be authentic and relevant, and can produce the effectiveness of proof of advantages."
The second-instance judgment of the civil case also shows that the court determined the relationship between Meizhi Company and the infringing Lepin Building Blocks through the evidence chain formed by Meizhi Company's public publicity terms, exhibition board content, staff business cards and other evidence.
According to Gao Weiping, a judge of the Shanghai No. 3 Intermediate People's Court who tried the case in the first instance, in recent years, the court has insisted on the overall strict conviction and sentencing when hearing such cases, and at the same time implemented the criminal policy of combining leniency and severity, so as to achieve a corresponding sense of responsibility.
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