Recently, People'scourt of Haidian district in Beijing made its decision for the case in whichthe famous musician Gao Xiaosong sued micro-blog marketing bloggersShao and Wang for reputation infringement. The two defendantswere sentenced to pay 123568 RMB for Gao Xiaosong’s emotional distress, lawyerfee, notary fees and court costs.

It was reported that thedefendant Wang spread a gossip that Gao Xiaosong fell in love with an actressin the name of his micro-blog marketing account “Wang Xiaodai” and that theother defendant forwarded and commented on the news in the name of his micro-blogmarketing account “Gossipy Yijie”, so the case began. After the abovemicroblogs were released, many citizens began to comment on and forward thenews, which had a very bad influence. Therefore, Gao Xiaosong entrusted Tahotalawyers to file a lawsuit so as to safeguard his legitimate rights andinterests, to standardize the order of the network information transmission andto advocate a civilized, honest, safe and orderly network.

As a social celebrityand public figure whose rights of personality would be limited due to socialsupervision by public opinions and public's rights to know, Gao Xiaosong shallbe obligated to put up with public's evaluative remarks. However, the boundaryof this obligation was not absolute, and fabrications and rumors were obviouslybeyond the necessary limits. The innovative point of this case lay in that itwas only a speculate description about facts involving other people’s reputationwithout any insulting behavior, but it constituted infringement because it hadmisled the public. The court decided that the two defendants who had stated afact or had a guess in the absence of facts involving Gao Xiaosong’s right ofreputation had infringed Gao Xiaosong’s reputation and that compared withsimilar cases, they had to pay a higher amount. This played a deterrent andguiding role in stopping unhealthy tendency of marketing mentionedabove, cracking down and preventing internet rumors, purifying network space,cultivating rational and civilized network environment and punishing harmfulinformation spreading behavior in accordance with the law.

Senior partner LiJingchuan’s team and senior partner Zhang Ling’s team from Tahota Beijing office,as Gao Xiaosong’s agents, took part in the whole process of this case. For along time, Tahota has been deepening our legal services in intellectualproperty and cultural industry and undertakings. We have been widely recognizedand highly appraised by clients from various fields by adhering to ourphilosophy of providing clients with high-quality and efficient legal services,collecting many partners with profound legal skills and practical experiences,and researching, summarizing and promoting relevant legal service works.