IPR/Espionage Ping-Pong Case: Fiat Sues Great Wall, Great Wall Sues Fiat

Fiat sued Great Wall, because it alleges that the Great Wall Peri infringes the intellectal property rights of the FIAT Panda. After this Great Wall sued FIAT at the Shijiazhuang People's Court, based on "evidence" provided by FIAT to the court that they made photo's of production facilities.

Fiat suspected Great Wall to have infringed its Panda's IPRs (ping), so it made photo's of Great Wall Peri's production facilities, so Great Wall sued Fiat for espionage (pong). Is this how it went? Is this how it continues? Ping-pong, ping-pong.

Read the China Briefing article here, or at the Financial Times, via the site of Autonews Gasgoo, here.

Comment of the week:
IP Dragon's friend Richard Osinga (writer and digital entrepreneur) wrote: "I guess the Chinese don't like it if an Italian car manufacturer calls its model Panda."

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"Great Wall Motor Not Infringing Fiat's Patent"

Reuters reports that Great Wall Motor Co Ltd made a statement saying that Fiat's claim that Great Wall infringing their patent was dismissed by Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court.

Read the Reuters article here and the Great Wall Motor's statement here.

The left picture is a Fiat Panda and right picture is a Great Wall Peri. Read more on the site of CarDesignNews, by Mr Eric Gallina, here.

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Protect Or Destroy: Pick Your Choice in Transformers' IPR

Mr John Neff of the Autoblog is ranting against China's car advertisments that use cars transforming into robots and vice versa. His article's title is: "Chinese automakers copy everything else, why not the Transformers", read more here.

One should distinguish the Transformers toys and cartoons of Hasbro and the movie the Transformers made by Michael Bay, who got the permission of the right holder to adapt the toys and cartoons into a special effects movie, from the idea of transforming cars into robots and vice versa. This idea cannot be protected, only the expression of this idea can.

Now in the case of a car advertisement, what kind of intellectual property rights are possibly infringed?

Let's first watch the advertisment from China Lifan Car on YouTube, here.

The soundtrack might be copyrighted; and in this YouTube video one can see the mask of the Autobots, which is trademarked (I am not sure if this mask is part of the advertisement or whether it is added to the advertisement later); the skating robot looks very similar to the expression of the skating robot in the movie, this could be an infringement of copyright; if the designs of the robot in the advertisment is too similar in case the Transformers' robots designs are registered, it could be a design rights infringement. What do you think?

The Great Wall Motor Company also uses cars that can change into robots and back. However, knocking-off this idea in advertisments and passing-off (misappropriating the reputation), is not done only by Chinese car companies. See on YouTube a skating Citroën here, and a dancing Yugo here. To show that you can use the idea of transformation from a car into a robot in a creative way, without getting associations with the Transformers, watch Nissan's advertisement here.

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