China is the second largest economy of the world and has equally large automobile production sector. China produces 22.7 percent of the total production of the world. But the dilemma is, that the majority of these cars are not offering innovative designs. A large number of these cars have been copied from the western automakers. Most of these cars are visually very similar to the models like Audi’s, BMW’s and Range Rovers. All these models from China are copies of western vehicles. Chinese companies have a less than proud history of copying designs of others and produce the similar at very price.
Some of these copied cars are clearly rip-offs, but others are more refined to the originals. They have a least expensive version of MINI, a Range Rover Evoque, a cent percent copy of Audi A4 and Volkswagen Tiguan. It is not the end of the list of copycat cars, Chinese automakers have even made a Rolls Royce as well.
A well-known solicitor on the intellectual property law was contacted by the automotive journalists to confirm if there are any laws for the copycats to stop them from copying the designs of other automakers.
He said, “There is no international copyright law but there are international agreements such as the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. These require countries to recognise each other’s intellectual property laws.” Copyright laws are different in every country and every government makes its own laws for its industry but the philosophies are same everywhere.
He further said that someone cannot claim the copyrights if other is using the similar material objects or even using the similar processes to make the product but it would be the case of breaching the copyright laws if manufacturer makes it as the original design.
“In the UK, copyright law protects certain types of work, including artistic, In terms of car designs, it’s likely that copyright would subsist in any original 2D graphic – on a computer screen or a drawing.”
It is not clear that the laws in China offer any kind of protection against copycats, but it is clear that these copycats are slowly dominating the world’s auto market.
