China is witnessing the amount of lawsuits to have spiked 100 times over the infringement of the IP in font and typeface designs over a decade, The Beijing News has learned. The damages per infringement in suits filed against e-commerce shop owners have averaged 800 USD.

The case where Founder Group, a Chinese technology conglomerate, sued Blizzard Entertainment, a US game giant, over the fonts of Chinese calligraphy, asking for damages of about 40 million USD, massively raised the awareness of the IP in the font and typeface designs in China 14 years ago.

Upon the characters “字体 著作权” (“font copyright” in Chinese) being typed into the search engine on the Qichacha website, 352 cases of copyright infringement of font and typeface designs will be presented as results pages to function as risk warnings against the enterprises involved in these cases as defendants. So far, there have been 34 actions filed in 2021.

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