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January 08, 2007

When the world is flat, German blogs get sued in China

Thomas Knüwer of Handelsblatt posts about a German blog, autoregional.de, that posted a link to a story in Der Spiegel about a German bus producer suing a Chinese company for stealing a bus design. Autoregional, which is produced by the SEO company Iven & Hillmann, cited the Spiegel article and added a single sentence: "This example shows how fast and ruthless Chinese are when it comes to copying." So, now Iven & Hillmann are being sued for libel for hurting the Chinese company's business. As Thomas points out, the offending sentence in the Autoregional post is less hurtful to the Chinese company's business than the headline in Die Welt: "Chinese steal bus design..." He guesses that Autoregional is getting sued while Die Welt is not because Die Welt is big and Autoregional is little. [Tags: blogosphere libel germany autoregional copyright gv]

Posted by D. Weinberger at January 8, 2007 01:51 PM

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