China: 77-year Old Wins Portrait Lawsuit

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China: 77-year Old Wins Portrait Lawsuit

People’s Daily, June 13, 2003

Beijing, China - A 77-year old farmer from northwest China's Shaanxi Province has won a lawsuit against a Beijing-based magazine for the illegal use of his portrait.

Chang Guoyi, a resident of Suide County, where men are widely seen as the most handsome in the country, sued "Forum on Townshipsand Towns" for using his photo on the cover without his prior approval.

The cover was entitled "Happiness" to indicate the happy life of villagers in present-day China. The magazine rejected the plaintiff's claim, insisting that the usage was approved by the photographer Lu Guangchen who took the photo.

However, Chang took it as an insult, because his neighbors thought that he had made money from the "ads", and moreover, he said it is traditional in China's rural areas that elderly people do not enjoy being photographed.

The elderly man asked the magazine to pay 60,000 yuan (about 7,230 US dollars) in compensation for the financial losses he had suffered due to the illegal publishing of the photo, and another 60,000 yuan for the rights to the portrait.

The Intermediate People's Court of Beijing concluded that the magazine had used the man's portrait inappropriately and ordered it to offer a written apology, to pay 2,000 yuan (about 240 US dollars) for using the portrait and 1,052 yuan (less than 130 US dollars) for the man's financial losses.

The magazine had used the photo in a positive way, inflicting no harm on Chang, while the elderly man brought the excessive losses on himself because he had handled the matter inappropriately, said the court, which stopped short of supporting the plaintiff in his claim for compensation.

The court also determined that his claim that elderly persons dislike being photographed as "groundless".