It is widely reported (in Chinese) that Beijing Haidian District People’s Court has given its decision on the copyright disputes between CTrip and Qunar.com.
Qunar’s search engine crawls CTrip’s website, as well as other similar sites, and search the customers’ comments to hotels, then list the thumbnails of those comments in Qunar’s own pages. According to the news, CTrip sent lawyer’s letter to Qunar three times in June and July. Then it sued Qunar in November.
According to the news (now the judgment still can not be obtained through the Internet), the court seems confirmed that CTrip "owns the copyright to the content and resources in its website". I wish it would just be a new wrongful or half-baked quotation by the journalists. If the court really ruled the case in this way, the court’s tender attitude to the database would create the new regulations in Chinese copyright law (no matter how illegal of this creation in Chinese legal system).
The defendant seems willing to appeal the case to the higher level court, according to the news, again.
Looking forward to read the full text of the judgement. Before that, I will not comment the case in details.
