Believing that Yahoo China has infringed his copyright by providing links to the photos he has taken for some stars, a professional photographer surnamed Wen has sued Yahoo China, asking the website company to pay CNY317,500 in compensation.
According to local media, Wen has taken 39 life photos for Chinese stars, including Zhang Ziyi, Fan Bingbing and Lin Xinru. Recently, he found that these photos can be searched via Yahoo China's website. Believing the company has infringed his copyright by publishing these photos without his authorization, he had decided to sue.
Yahoo China's legal representative says that their client is a search engine and only provides links to those pictures without replicating, storing or editing them, so there is no such a thing as infringing Wen's copyright. But, in fact, search engines do index pictures and store them for quick retrieval, so it is unclear what the legal representative meant.
Beijing's Chaoyang District Court has not made a final judgment on the case.