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Jail sentence upheld on man who copied Lego
From:Shine  |  2020-12-29 20:47

A Lego product (left) and a Lepin product

A six-year prison sentence for a mansurnamedLi who infringed the Lego toy company’s copyright had been upheld after a retrial, the city’s high court said on Tuesday.

Li was fined 90 million yuan (US$13.18 million) and another eight people jailed for up to four and a half years, the same as the sentence at the first trial at Shanghai No. 3 People’s Intermediate Court in September.

Li established MZ Smart Technology Co in 2011, focusing on the development, production and selling of toys. Over 400 kinds of toys with independent intellectual property rights were developed and its business scope gradually expanded to AI robots and other high-tech areas.

However, in 2015 Li decided to copy Lego products after he noticed his friends earning a lot of money in the building block industry.

He got other people to buy Lego products for research and to copy. A factory was established to produce Lepin toys in 2017.

Over the next two years, the company sold more than 4.24 million boxes ofLepinproducts, involving 300 million yuan. And over 600,000 boxes, worth 30.5 million yuan, were found in a warehouse by police last year.

Ti Gong

A Lego product (left) and a Lepin product

Li was arrested on April 22 last year inGuangdongProvince and his colleagues gave themselves up to police between May and August the same year.

After the first trial, they lodged an appeal, claiming that their illegal gains were less than the intermediate court had found because sales returns and discounts hadn’t been considered. But there was no evidence to back their claims.

One of the employees said the defendant should be the company, rather than individuals, who should receive a lighter punishment.

However, the high court rejected their appeal, saying they had used personal accounts for the illegal business, not the company’s bank account, and were paid in cash.

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