(Yicai) Feb. 14 -- Chinese tech giant ByteDance was ruled to pay CNY82.7 million (USD11.3 million) compensation to Chinese audio-visual solutions provider Meishe Network Technology for software code copyright infringement.

ByteDance plagiarized Meishe's code in eight products, including TikTok's sister app Douyin, video-editing tool Jianying, and photo-editing tool FaceU, Beijing-based Meishe announced on its official WeChat account yesterday, citing the ruling of the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China.

Meishe filed a lawsuit against ByteDance to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court and Beijing Senior People's Court in May 2021. The courts made their first-instance judgments in June 2023 and May 2024, respectively, finding ByteDance guilty and ordering it to pay Meishe CNY26.7 million in damages. However, the two companies were unsatisfied and appealed to the Supreme Court.

ByteDance found that an engineer who worked at Meishe and joined the company two and a half years later was responsible for the code copyright infringement, Vice President Li Liang said in a statement yesterday. The engineer was fired.

According to the ruling, the codes involved in the case account for a very small proportion of the two firms' software, equal to no more than 4 percent of Meishe's and 0.8 percent of Douyin's code, Li noted.

ByteDance has already organized several compliance training courses for its technical personnel and conducted systematic checks on its code to prevent such incidents from happening again, Li added.

Founded in 2014, Meishe provides video and audio solutions based on generative artificial intelligence. It holds more than 70 patents in the fields of video and audio engines, graphics and image processing, and computer vision.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Futura Costaglione