Three popular video apps developed and owned by a Beijing technology firm have been barred from streaming Tencent’s top two mobile games, a court has announced.
Guangzhou’s Intellectual Property Court issued two injunctions on Wednesday July 24. One was to stop Huoshan Live App from streaming shows involving Honor of Kings – a multiplayer online battle arena developed and published by Tencent Games for the iOS and Android mobile platforms, exclusively for the Chinese market, the Paper reported.
The second injunction was to stop two other platforms, Watermelon Video and Jianren Toutiao, from streaming shows of Tencent’s CrossFire – an online tactical first-person shooter game.
The three apps streaming live videos were all developed and owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance Technology Co Ltd.
It was argued that most of the live streaming content centered on how individual players were operating in the game in “real time”, and that they made no original or unique contributions but infringed the copyright of Tencent by showcasing the content in terms of continuous graphics and sound.
The court cited Tencent’s user agreement, which states that users are not allowed to record, stream or spread Tencent games-related content without its authorization.
ByteDance replied that they would file an appeal against the two injunctions, as they believed that showcasing players in the game on their own was original content, for which the user should deserve copyright, or at least sharing part of the copyright with Tencent.