Shenzhen court held Tencent's AI-assisted Dreamwriter article copyrightable; copier ordered to pay RMB 1,500

What happened

In Tencent Company v Yingxun Company, Case No. Y0305MC No. 14010, the People's Court of Nanshan District, Shenzhen, held on 24 December 2019 that a financial report generated with Tencent's Dreamwriter writing-assistance software was a copyrightable literary work. Tencent's team had generated the article on 20 August 2018, within two minutes of the stock market close, and published it on Tencent's finance website; defendant Shanghai Yingxun Technology Co., Ltd republished it on its own website the same day without permission. Tencent sued on 24 May 2019.

Holding

The court found the article original because Tencent's creative team made personalized selections and judgments in the preparatory work (data input, trigger conditions, templates, text corpus) and in running the software, and held that Tencent owned the copyright as a corporate work created under its sponsorship and responsibility. The defendant was ordered to pay RMB 1,500 for economic loss and rights-protection expenses.

Scope note

In this case Tencent was the plaintiff asserting copyright in an AI-assisted output, not a defendant accused of training on others' work. The case is filed as Tencent AI-copyright litigation history; it does not establish any training-data infringement by Tencent.