According to a state media report, five Hollywood studios sued a Chinese online service and an Internet café, on accusations that they offered pirated downloads of “Pirates of the Caribbean”, as well as other more or less popular movies.
The Beijing-based web site Jeboo.com and an Internet café from Shanghai are now facing a legal battle in trying to defend themselves from five popular studios such as Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney, Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios.
The American movie-makers accused Jeboo.com of creating software that the Internet café was then selling; the studios are now demanding 3.2 million yuan ($432,000) in compensation.
Jeboo.com is a web site that promotes itself as “My on-line cinema” and claims to be China’s biggest film download provider, features up to 30,000 movies and television series that is customers could copy onto their computers. Xie Jiangping, a company officially, “refused to comment on whether it had violated the film companies’ copyright,” according to Xinhua.
However, a statement on the web site itself says that its vast range of entertainment is “legally obtained” through “content providing partners”, who have signed copyright contracts.
The legal war between the five major American studios and Jeboo.com is likely to become a real war between China and United States, symbolically speaking, as the United States have always accused the Chinese authorities to do far too little for stopping commercial pirates.
Washington has even complained to the World Trade Organization that the slipshod Chinese rules have allowed a booming industry in pirated American goods, which include movies, music and software and which cost the American firms billions and billions of dollars.
On the Chinese streets, the pirated DVD has started to cost as little as $1, much less than the legitimate copies sold in the wealthy countries. Web sites that offer downloadable entertainment are very popular among the country’s millions of Internet users, who are not used to being afraid of the authorities, despite the fact that the country claims its intellectual property safeguards meet the international standards and that the government is determined to stamp out piracy. Still, China admitted that the effort might take many years.
According to Xinhua, the five American studios accused Jeboo.com and the Internet café of distributing 13 movies without permission, including Night at the Museum and X-Men 2.
This is not the first time that the American companies have sued the Chinese copiers. In September, several studios sued and won damages from a Beijing business that was selling copies of “Lord of the Rings” and other popular movies.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 7:08 am and is filed under Stuff, Biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.