Is It Legitimate for Toutiao.com to Transcode News Websites for Mobile Users?

toutiao

(By You Yunting) According to news, Toutiao, a personalized news app, announced that Toutiao has secured 100 million dollar of Series C financing at a valuation of 500 million dollar. Afterwards, the Beijing News, a traditional paper news, soon posted a comment that Toutiao’s contents are suspected of copyright infringement. However, Toutiao instantly replied in denying infringement. In today’s post, we would like to analyze the infringement issues of Toutiao from the legal prospective.

First is to introduce the push approach of Toutiao. When visiting its official website on a computer, it is found to be relatively regulated, similar with the news channel of Baidu and Google, that every recommended news had an abstract linking to the original website which published the news.

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Is It Lawful for News Websites to Demand Payment of Fees for Google and Baidu Searches

(By You Yunting) According to a report in the New York Times, as also reported by some European websites, Google is recompiling its searched news results as a news page. It may be said that this method could infringe the copyright of the original publishing websites and, as a result, Google should pay fees for the websites. This idea has received support from both the French and German Governments, yet Google believes that its behavior fully conforms to the law, and thus should not have to pay any fees. In China, the main search engines Google and Baidu provide this kind of news search service, and today’s post will discuss whether it is lawful for news websites to claim fees from the search engines.

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Parody on Copyrighted Works Could Be Infringement? II

the poster of the parodic World of Warcraft

By Albert Chen

II. Is it necessary infringing of parody?

Just like analyzed above, the “transformative use” may be the re-creation basing on the ideas, and also could be the re-creation relying on the “expression”. Therefore, the infringement of parody could not be determined in general and should be considered in situations.

1. The parody with transformative use of idea

The basic principle of Copyright Law is to protect the expression while such protection will not extend to the idea which is not detailed by the expression. Surely, there has regulated no specific standard or border between the abstract of idea and the concrete of expression, and that makes the judgment depend on the case analysis.

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