Painter ordered to pay damages for plagiarism

A Chinese painter has been ordered to pay 5 million yuan ($688,000) in damages to a Belgian artist for plagiarism, according to a ruling recently announced by Beijing Intellectual Property Court.

In the verdict, the court urged Ye Yongqing, a professor of oil painting at Chongqing-based Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, to stop the infringement of Christian Silvain's artworks, and also required Ye to make a public apology in the media to the Belgian.

The 73-year-old Silvain posted the result of the lawsuit on social media at the end of last month, saying "After four years of waiting, we won the trial in China", ThePaper.cn, a Shanghai-based news outlet, reported on Friday.

Ye, who was born in 1958 and was among the first Chinese artists exposed to Western modernism, had not made any comment about the result as of press time.

Since the 1980s, Silvain has created a series of artworks with elements such as birds, nests, bird cages, red cross frames and airplanes, and he published an album of works in 1990.

The Belgian sued Ye after finding Ye had continuously copied ideas from his own collage series and profited from them since the 1990s, claiming that Ye did not identify the original author of the artworks but signed his own name instead, and that Ye also modified the paintings without getting his permission.

In addition, Silvain complained that Ye copied, exhibited and published the works to seek profits, with plagiarism of 87 artworks over a period of more than 25 years.

Based on that, Silvain and his lawyer asked the court to stop Ye's infringement and pay more than 50 million yuan in compensation, along with a public apology.

"The amount of the compensation supported by the court is far from that requested by the Belgian, and Ye, the defendant, hasn't responded. So the verdict, I believe, is just a temporary result," said Liu Bin, a lawyer in Beijing who specializes in handling intellectual property cases.

He added that the final result of the case depends on whether the two sides appeal, even though the Belgian artist has announced the victory of the lawsuit online.

Regardless of the appeal, he said, "Chinese courts will always uphold and give equal protection to litigants, no matter where they are from."

The Beijing IP Court was set up at the end of 2014 to address a rising number of IP disputes.

Data released by the court at the beginning of this year showed that it has filed more than 28,100 lawsuits involving foreign affairs since its establishment, accounting for over 22 percent of its cases.

The foreign litigants were from more than 100 countries and regions.

caoyin@chinadaily.com.cn