Copyright Dispute between Koolearn and 51Talk Settled

English Study

Recently, the long-running copyright dispute which started since 2017 between Koolearn and 51 Talk was finally settled. 51 Talk was judged to pay 240,000 Yuan in compensation and a reasonable expenditure of 6,600 Yuan.

The reason of the lawsuit, as mentioned in the civil judgement by Beijing Municipality Haidian District People's Court, was that the courses that 51 Talk enjoyed a large sale on Tmall Store at a price of 1 Yuan included multiple English teaching videos, the copyright of which belonged to Koolearn. Therefore, Koolearn sued 51 Talk and Tmall for copyright infringement and claimed a compensation of 1,265,000 Yuan.

The notarial certificate submitted by Koolearn records that those online courses all contain characters like “Koolearn” in the background. However, the majority of these courses don’t have authorship except for one or two with authorship of Koolearn’s teachers. Meanwhile, Koolearn, together with its signed teachers, submitted a Copyright Ownership Statement stating that it was Koolearn who owned the copyright (not including the right of authorship) of the courses. However, Tmall, as the main platform for trading services, failed to prohibit illegal trade.

Lu Senlin, director of Online Education Research Institute, said that it’s important to intensify IP protection of online education companies when the time comes. Some practitioners also said that the key to standing out lies in high-quality teaching resources and contents which are also core differentiated competition advantages. More importantly, copyright is the foundation of online education and a significant target for healthy and long-term development. Therefore, online education platforms should not only protect the copyright by themselves but also cooperate with the entire industry to intensify IP protection. In the Entrepreneurial Age of 2.0, the long-term growth of online education can only be guaranteed when the platforms cooperate with publishers in a legitimate way.

April 12, 2019

Source: Beijing Business Today

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