CHINA – A Chinese court has found in favour of United Business Media (UBM) in a case of unfair competition practice involving a local competitor to its GDC China gaming tradeshow.
The Shanghai Lu Wan District People's Law Court ruled in favour of UBM following the company’s claims that defendants Publishers Association of China Game Publication Committee (CGPA), and Beijing Howell International Trade Fair (Howell), had engaged in unfair competitive practice.
The ruling is the first court judgment pertaining to this lawsuit in China.
The court’s decision saw both CGPA and Howell penalised for violating "People’s Republic of China Anti-unfair Competition Law" in its approach to competing with UBM’s GDC China event, fundamentally failing to exercise fairness and credibility, and generally recognised business ethics in the marketplace.
"Though it has been a long struggle over the past three years, we are proud of our continued ability to produce the Game Developers Conference China," said GDC director Meggan Scavio. "We sincerely hope that we can now move forward to more completely fulfil our goal of supporting and serving the Chinese game community."
UBM is the parent company of the UBM TechWeb Game Network, the producer and owner of the worldwide Game Developers Conferences (GDC) events. The original GDC event has been held annually in California for more than 20 years.
The first Chinese edition of UBM’s Game Developers Conference was held in the autumn of 2007 as a joint partnership between UBM and IDG China World Expo. Following a year of preparation between the two groups for the inaugural event, UBM and IDG added the CGPA and Howell as partners less than one month before doors opened to attendees. At the time it was believed the partnership would provide holistic support for the games industry in China.
But despite the first event’s success, disputes and delays led to the cancellation of the 2008 event, eventually resulting in the dissolution of the partnerships.
The CGPA and Howell subsequently announced an event of their own - with a near-identical moniker - the China Game Developers Conference, planned to run alongside the Howell-run ChinaJoy consumer event in the summer of 2009.
As part of the marketing and communication for the new event, both Howell and CGPA claimed to be the main organisers (“organising units”) for the inaugural 2007 event organised by UBM.
However, the court ruled that the CGPA was just a "supporting unit" to the 2007 Game Developers Conference in China, with no evidence of themselves as organising units. In addition, the court deemed the CGPA's subsequent acts of intentionally misrepresenting themselves as original show producers of the 2007 event to membesr – and writing to members restricting them from attending the UBM-produced GDC China event – as an of abuse of the CGPA’s power. According to a UBM spokesman, this caused harm and damages to UBM, as well as violating the country's "PRC Anti-unfair Competition Law."
In a further judgement, the Shanghai court deemed a series of actions and defaming public testimonials from CGPA after the 2007 event towards UBM, to be slander.
UBM has since produced a second edition of the official GDC event, run in 2009 under the name ‘Game Developers Conference China’. The third edition of the event, the 2010 Game Developers Conference China, takes place on 5-7 December at the International Shanghai Convention Center.
