Asia Tech Wire (June 13) -- A Chinese court has ruled against TikTok owner ByteDance in software copyright infringement cases, requiring it to pay more than 20 million yuan in damages.

The Beijing High People's Court issued a first-instance judgment in late May in cases involving ByteDance's Douyin and CapCut software.

The court found that the two software programs infringed on the copyright of Meicam SDK, a software of Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co., Ltd, and ordered the three ByteDance-affiliated entities to publicly apologize to Meishe, compensating it for its economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 20.4347 million yuan.

Since then, Meishe has won at first instance in all eight cases it has brought against a number of ByteDance's affiliates in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court and the Beijing High People's Court for code plagiarism of a number of ByteDance's software.

In May 2021, Meishe sued a number of ByteDance's affiliates for code plagiarism in the two courts on the grounds of infringement of computer software copyrights.

And at the end of June 2023, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court rendered a first-instance judgment in the six cases of Meishe v. ByteDance for code plagiarism, ordering the defendants to stop infringing on the copyright of the Meicam SDK software.

The court ruled at the time that ByteDance needed to compensate Meishe for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 6.27 million yuan.