Firm fined for Chinese character fault

Dow's "dao" character is a lucky brand for China

Media multinational Dow Jones has been ordered to apologise and pay 400,000 yuan (£29,000; $48,000) compensation, after using the work of a well-known Chinese calligrapher without permission.

Guan Dongsheng was commissioned to draw the character "dao", which approximates to the company's name and sounds auspicious to Chinese ears, as a gift for its chairman in 1994.

But he sued in July this year, after the firm adopted it as a logo for its Chinese operations, arguing that it had tacit permission to use the design as it pleased.

A Beijing court upheld Mr Guan's argument, but did not grant all the 5m yuan compensation that he had demanded.

The firm insisted it might appeal against the decision, querying Mr Guan's insistence that he had only just realised that his work had been adopted as a logo: Dow Jones has used it for almost nine years, and Mr Guan did work for the company until 2001.

Name games

As ever more foreign firms and foreign brands pour into China, such disputes are becoming more common.

A Shanghai court is currently considering a dispute over the Chinese rights for the name "Champs Elysee", after a local property developer claimed to have registered the Paris street name as its brand.

And the firm behind the Beatrix Potter children's books recently won damages from a state-run publishing house which had reprinted the stories; Chinese translations of Peter Rabbit were registered as trademarks in 1943, before the Communists came to power.

Until recently, China had a reputation for flouting international copyright rules, with even state-run firms frequently accused of abusing intellectual property rights.

But courts now seem be trying to enforce copyrights more strictly, probably a result of China joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001.