On April 22nd 2013, the Supreme People’s Court held a press conference and announced the top 10 legal protection of intellectual property cases in Chinese courts of 2012. Yao Ming and Wuhan Yunhe Big Shark Sporting Good Co., Ltd.’s rights of personality and unfair competition dispute litigation, represented by lawyer Zhang Hong and lawyer Xu Jin, was selected to the list.

The Supreme People’s Court considered the following as the importance of this case as a model example: The issue of personality merchandising has always been a heavily debated topic in the world of law theory and judicial practice. Rights of personality, including name, portrait and other external symbols or features, display substantial commercial values in the commodity economy, especially with celebrities’ names and portraits. This case, due to the reputation and influence of Yao Ming himself, drew great attention from the media and the society. The case not only granted protection for a natural person’s name and portrait, which had commercial values and were used in commercial operations, through the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, but also chose to apply the Anti-Unfair Competition and its judicial interpretation in the calculation of compensation. It provided guidelines for similar dispute cases on the issues of rights of personality and unfair competition.

Link to this case: http://www.chinacourt.org/article/detail/2013/04/id/949762.shtml

This case also well demonstrated Beijing Janlea Law Firm’s ability to represent difficult and sophisticated cases, especially the ones that involve celebrities’ rights protection in the field of intellectual property.