Hasbro, the entertainment company that owns Peppa Pig, has prevailed in a copyright infringement lawsuit against SConnect, the Vietnamese creators of the animated series Wolfoo. A high court judge in London determined that Wolfoo videos contained unauthorized audio clips from Peppa Pig, including sounds of the character saying words such as “Hooray!” The court ordered all infringing videos to be removed from online platforms including YouTube and YouTube Kids before 4pm BST on Monday.
The judge found that audio from Peppa Pig appeared across all 92 English-language Wolfoo videos examined during the case, as well as in 75 percent of the foreign-language videos. SConnect had argued that audio used in videos made before mid-2020 came from an independent third-party contractor without the company’s knowledge, and that subsequent videos used original in-house recordings. The court rejected these claims, stating that the copying evidence was “compelling” and that the practice had been “prolific” and “longstanding.”
The legal action commenced in 2022, when Hasbro and Astley Baker Davies, the London-based studio behind Peppa Pig, alleged that SConnect had attempted to mislead young viewers, typically aged two to five, into confusing Wolfoo with Peppa Pig. While the original complaint also cited similarities in character design and artwork, the court case centered on the audio component as the strongest basis for proving infringement.
Wolfoo, an animated series depicting a young wolf and his family, has accumulated hundreds of millions of views since its release in 2018 across various platforms and languages including English, Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish. Like Peppa Pig, it targets children aged two to seven. SConnect contested the scope of the removal order, arguing it should apply only to the sampled videos and claiming the judge’s directive covering the UK, EU and 166 World Trade Organization member states was excessive. The judge characterized the copying as “extensive” and “seemingly endemic” in the English-language content.
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
Article summary produced by Claude AI