Chinese copyright law operates on the principle that copyright arises automatically at the moment a work is created, with no mandatory registration requirement. Registration with the China Copyright Protection Center (CCPC) or a provincial copyright bureau serves only as prima facie evidence of ownership, not as the source of rights. This structural feature creates a well-known vulnerability: a bad-faith actor who gets hold of someone else's unpublished design can rush to file a copyright registration in its own name and then use that certificate as a weapon — to intimidate, to launch a commercial project, or to sue the true author. A 2024–2025 case decided by the Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone People's Court shows exactly how the system handles that scenario, and why a registration certificate is not a shield.
In October 2024, an individual designer — referred to here as Mr. Li — independently created a series of graphic designs for a commemorative "2024 Medal" used in skills competitions. He produced full design drafts, layered source files, and sent the artwork to a manufacturing vendor for prototyping. On 9 October 2024, the source files were saved and the prototype confirmation sheets were signed, establishing a clear, datable creation record.
A company referred to here as [Company T], a Wuhan-based technology service provider, had been in contact with Mr. Li about possibly using the medal design for a provincial-level vocational skills competition it was contracted to organise. The two sides discussed cooperation but never reached an agreement. Within weeks, [Company T] took a near-identical medal artwork, filed a copyright registration application in its own name with the national registry, and obtained a Certificate of Work Registration in November 2024. It then put the design into actual use across the competition's physical medals, promotional materials, and event branding.
Mr. Li discovered the reuse, recognised his own design, and sued. His claims: copyright ownership, infringement of his moral rights (attribution and integrity), and unfair commercial exploitation. He asked the court to order [Company T] to stop using the design, publicly eliminate the adverse effect, retract the bad-faith registration, and pay damages plus reasonable enforcement costs.
Three provisions of the Copyright Law of the PRC (2020 Amendment) did the heavy lifting:
● Article 2 — copyright protects works of authorship; protection attaches upon creation.
● Article 9 — the owner enjoys economic rights (reproduction, distribution, communication to the public) and moral rights (attribution, integrity).
● Article 54 — damages are assessed on actual loss, infringing gain, or a statutory range of 500 yuan to 5,000,000 yuan per work when precise figures are unavailable.
Critically, the Judicial Interpretation on Copyright Civil Disputes (2020) provides that a registration certificate is rebuttable evidence. When the defendant relies on a certificate but the plaintiff produces earlier creation proof — drafts, source-file metadata, vendor records, messages — the court weighs the raw evidence, not the certificate's face value.
Mr. Li's team filed:
● Layered design source files with creation timestamps predating [Company T]'s registration by over a month.
● WeChat negotiation records showing [Company T] had seen the design and talks collapsed without a licence.
● Prototype confirmation sheets signed by the manufacturing vendor on 9 October 2024.
● Side-by-side visual comparison demonstrating the registered artwork reproduced his composition, layout, figure styling and colour scheme.
[Company T] defended on two lines: first, that the registration certificate proved it owned the copyright; second, that common elements like the Yellow Crane Tower silhouette and plum blossoms were public-domain motifs and thus not protectable. The court rejected both. On the certificate point, the judge stated plainly that copyright registration is administrative formality, not a title deed — a registrant who did not create the work cannot acquire rights by filing. On the public-domain point, the court noted that while individual motifs may be free, the specific selection, arrangement and expression Mr. Li produced cleared the originality threshold.
The Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone People's Court ruled for Mr. Li:
1. [Company T] infringed Mr. Li's copyright by reproducing and exploiting the medal design without consent.
2. [Company T] must stop use in the competition and all derived materials.
3. [Company T] must apply to the registry to cancel its bad-faith registration within a set period — a remedy that goes beyond ordinary damages and directly unwinds the fraudulent record.
4. [Company T] must publish a statement eliminating the adverse effect.
5. [Company T] must pay Mr. Li 30,000 yuan in economic loss plus reasonable costs.
The 30,000 yuan figure reflects the statutory-damages pathway: Mr. Li could not prove a precise licensing market rate for a one-off competition medal, and [Company T]'s direct gain was modest, so the court landed inside the statutory band with reference to the work's creative effort, the defendant's bad faith, and the commercial context.
Most Chinese copyright judgments stop at stop-use + damages + statement. Ordering the losing registrant to affirmatively retract its own registration is less common and signals a harder line against copyright squatting. The logic: leaving the false certificate alive lets [Company T] re-use it against the next victim, or against Mr. Li himself in another province. By compelling withdrawal, the court treats the registration as evidence tainted at the root, not merely as a document the plaintiff can ignore.
This aligns with a broader enforcement trend. The Supreme People's Procuratorate's Procuratorial Guideline Case No. 192 (2023) targeted a Hangzhou agency that induced vendors to register other people's textile patterns and then sued for 3.4 million yuan in fake-infringement claims; the ringleader got 11 years 6 months in prison. The message from prosecutors and judges is consistent: a registration certificate obtained by misrepresentation is not just weak evidence, it is a tool of abuse the system will unwind.
The case is a compact checklist for any business touching third-party creative assets in China:
● A CCPC certificate is not ownership. If your vendor hands you a registration number, that proves only what they filed, not that they created the work. Demand source files, creation logs, and a chain-of-title letter.
● Keep dated creation evidence. Timestamped source files, prototype sheets, and negotiation logs beat a later certificate every time. Mr. Li won because his 9 October trail was airtight.
● Written licence or assignment is mandatory. Verbal "you can use it" discussions, like [Company T]'s talks with Mr. Li, create no rights. Get a signed licence naming the work, scope, territory and fee.
● Don't file a registration over a work you didn't create. Beyond losing the infringement case, you expose the company to retraction orders, bad-faith findings, and in egregious patterns, criminal referral.
● Audit your own portfolio. If a design agency registered assets in your name that your team never authored, you are sitting on a liability. Re-verify provenance before relying on those certificates in a deal or lawsuit.
For foreign companies, the trap is especially sharp: a China subsidiary sometimes receives a "registered copyright" from a local design vendor as part of a deliverables package, assumes it is clean, and later faces a claim from the true author — who, unlike the vendor, holds the source-file timeline. The [Company T] judgment is a reminder that the certificate is the easiest thing to obtain and the weakest thing to rely on.
● China Copyright Protection Center (official registration authority)
● National Copyright Administration of China – news and typical cases
● Supreme People's Procuratorate – Procuratorial Guideline Case No. 192 (copyright false-litigation ring)
● Jincheng Tongda & Neal – Visual China v. Dai Jianfeng: image copyright compliance analysis
