Motorola was sued yesterday by a designer in Beijing with violating his copyright in a magazine advertisement for the world famous mobile phone producer.

The plaintiff, Pan Zhe, wants compensation of 500,000 yuan (US$60,000) from Motorola and the magazine, called Mangazine.

He also wants a public apology.

But sources with Motorola say the firm denies the accusation.

"Motorola should not be the defendant in this case," Ma Xiaogang, the lawyer representing the company, said yesterday in court.

"Advertising for Motorola was conducted by an authorized company. Motorola was not engaged in producing the advertisement," he claimed.

The advertisement differed from the work of the plaintiff's company, the defendant added.

The first hearing was held yesterday at the Beijing No 2 Intermediate People's Court. No judgment was made.

According to the plaintiff, Pan's company invested 500,000 yuan (US$60,000) in designing a series of picture advertisements for a wine company based in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region last year.

The pictures, set in a desert, as well as the script were registered as a copyright at the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Copyright in June last year, according to the plaintiff's lawyer Deng Zemin.

The company submitted the whole layout of the advertisement to Mangazine and signed a publishing contract with it in June last year, according to the plaintiff.

The plaintiff also signed a contract with the Xinjiang-based company for its work worth 1 million yuan (US$120,000) in the same month.

"But in August my client found that a Motorola advertisement published in Mangazine was nearly the same as the plaintiff's," Deng said.

"What annoyed us was that the producer and publisher of the advertisement was Mangazine, which was fully aware of our design," he said.

The Xinjiang-based company scrapped its contract with the plaintiff due to Motorola's advertisement, according to Deng.

But Yin Peng, the lawyer representing Mangazine, claimed that no staff had seen any material relating to the plaintiff's advertisement design.

"Relations between us and the plaintiff were quite simple. They paid us to publish an advertisement. Nothing more," he said yesterday in court.

According to the defendant, Mangazine completed the design of the Motorola advertisement in April 2004.

"Our working group has no relation with the plaintiff," the lawyer said.

Yin added that many artistic work focused on desert scenes.

"If the similarity of line of thinking results in copyright infringement, the design of the plaintiff would have violated the intellectual right of many previous desert films," he said.

 (China Daily March 10, 2005)