Kriti Agrawal
ByteDance, the owner of the popular short video-sharing apps TikTok and Douyin, intends to fight rival Tencent Holdings in Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court over what constitutes fair use in China’s competitive online entertainment market.
ByteDance, based in Beijing, announced that it would appeal a decision made by the Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court in April.
The Court ruled that the ByteDance app Douyin Huoshan Version, a short video and live-streaming site, must stop incentivizing users to live-stream Tencent’s Honor of Kings, the world’s most popular mobile role-playing game.
The Court also ordered ByteDance to pay Tencent 8 million yuan (US$1.2 million) in damages for infringing on its copyright.
ByteDance, on the other hand, claims that Douyin Huoshan does not infringe on any intellectual property rights because users own the copyright to the content they make.
The Court decided in favour of Shenzhen-based Tencent, which operates the world’s largest video game company in terms of revenue, could bolster its efforts to dominate live-streaming in China.
ByteDance also accused Tencent of spreading misleading news about Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, through its media and other content outlets The most famous of the accounts singled out by ByteDance had just 500 followers.
ByteDance had previously filed a 90-million-yuan lawsuit against Tencent, alleging that the company violated its market dominance by refusing to allow Douyin content on its WeChat and QQ messaging platforms.
ByteDance withdrew the case in March of this year after it was relocated from Fuzhou, the capital of founder Zhang Yiming’s home province of Fujian, to the southern city of Shenzhen, where Tencent is headquartered.
