Apple fined by Chinese court for copyright infringement of ebooks

A Beijing court have ordered Apple Inc. to pay 1.03 Million yuan/about $165,000 for selling unlicensed copies of books from eight local writers via their app store.

Apple usually requires developers to sign an agreement stating that they have all the rights of the material in their apps that will be sold in Apple’s app store, but the attorneys for the writers argued that the software that was sold in the app store contained unlicensed digital copies of writer’s books.

This is the second time in four months that Apple have had to pay for infringement. The company had to pay 520,000 yuan to a Chinese encyclopaedia publisher during September and they also had to pay $60 Million to a local firm of a Hong Kong based company to settle trademark disputes over the “iPad” name.

Source: WSJ