On February 12, 2025, Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co., Ltd. (北京美摄网络科技有限公司) announced that China’s Supreme People’s Court ruled against ByteDance for copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation awarding Meishe 82.668 million RMB. Meishe alleged that ByteDance’s Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok) infringed the copyright of Meishe’s SDK software. Several other ByteDance products also allegedly infringed.

At the end of June 2023 and the end of May 2024, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court and the Beijing High People’s Court respectively made first-instance judgments, finding that ByteDance and its affiliated companies infringed the copyright of Meishe SDK software, and ordered them to apologize to Meishe and compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling approximately RMB 26.704 million. Both parties appealed to the Supreme People’s Court.

On appeal, the Supreme People’s Court made a final judgment, upholding the infringement determination of the first-instance judgment, and increased the first-instance damages. The second-instance judgment ordered ByteDance and its affiliated companies to immediately stop infringing on the copyright of Meishe SDK software, apologize to Meishe, and ordered ByteDance and an unnamed employee (believed to be Jing Xie) to immediately stop infringing on Meishe’s trade secrets. Compensation for the nine related cases totaled approximately 82.668 million RMB.

Per Meishe, ByteDance and its affiliates refused to submit the software source code. The court determined that the software code was plagiarized based on decompilation and comparison of the target code and the similarity of the software-specific content. Further, ByteDance and its affiliated companies accessed Meishe’s software code through a Meishe employee, and both ByteDance and the employee infringed Meishe’s trade secrets.

As of the time of writing, I was unable to locate a copy of the decision. A parallel litigation in the U.S. is still pending. The full text of the announcement is available here (Chinese only).