"Code Plagiarism": ByteDance Ordered to Pay 82.668 Million in Damages!

On February 13, Meishe Technology announced that it had won the final ruling in a lawsuit against ByteDance, accusing the company of code plagiarism in eight of its products under the Douyin brand, and was awarded a compensation of 82.668 million RMB.

In response, Douyin’s Vice President, Li Liang, commented that a former Meishe engineer, while working at ByteDance, had reused part of the code that he wrote during his time at Meishe (according to judicial appraisal, the repeated code accounts for a very small portion, less than 4% of Meishe’s software and 0.8% of Douyin’s). This action was deemed a severe violation of company policy, which explicitly prohibits such behavior, and the employee has since left the company.

Back in 2021, Meishe Technology, alerted by a partner, noticed that in Douyin version 3.0, a large portion of the software code for audio-visual editing functions had been copied from Meishe’s copyrighted software, with even the misspelled function names being directly copied. It was as obvious as a student copying homework—so obvious that even the mistakes were copied exactly the same.

As a result, eight apps under ByteDance were implicated in this plagiarism controversy.

During the infringement period, Douyin’s daily active users surpassed 600 million, with revenues exceeding 264 billion RMB. From “Jianying” to “Light Makeup Camera,” this code dispute, involving products with hundreds of millions of users, immediately caught the attention of the tech industry.

Three years later, this protracted "code plagiarism" case has finally come to an end. However, key details were revealed in the court’s judgment: ByteDance refused to submit the source code of the involved software, forcing the court to rely on decompiled target code for comparison and identification.

The court ruled that the accused software and Meishe’s SDK core library files were substantially similar, and thus, the plagiarism of Douyin’s software code was established. In an even more dramatic turn, a former Meishe employee became a key witness—this employee had been involved in the core technology development at Meishe and later joined ByteDance, where they were responsible for Douyin's audio-video modules, directly facilitating the "code transfer." This not only infringed on copyright but could also constitute a trade secret violation. In the first-instance ruling, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court and the Beijing Higher People's Court ordered Douyin to publicly apologize to Meishe and pay 26.704 million RMB in damages.

However, neither party was satisfied with the ruling. Meishe, despite its annual licensing fee of just 350,000 RMB, demanded compensation of 2.274 billion RMB, claiming that the initial ruling’s compensation amount was insufficient.

In the second trial, the Supreme People’s Court determined that the first-instance damage compensation amount was too low, and after adjustment, Douyin was ordered to pay 82.668 million RMB to Meishe, a more than 200% increase from the initial ruling of 26.704 million RMB, setting a historical record in judicial compensation.

This case marks China’s first “billion-yuan-level” fine for code plagiarism involving a leading internet company, sending a strong message that goes far beyond the figure itself. The question remains: will companies continue with “borrowing innovation,” or will they invest in building genuine technological barriers? The more than 70 patents behind Meishe Technology’s research and development investments represent the “essential lessons” that ByteDance must learn.

“Protecting intellectual property is protecting the spark of innovation.” In the AI and algorithm-driven technological revolution, only by respecting the rules and focusing on core technologies can companies, like DeepSeek, gain respect on the global stage.