Chiung Yao pained by plagiarism case

BEIJING • Romance novelist Chiung Yao wrote on Weibo about her plagiarism case against mainland scriptwriter Yu Zheng, saying Hunan TV, at the centre of the case, hurt her painfully like "someone close".

Her Weibo post on Monday came two days after a Beijing court rejected Yu's appeal and upheld last December's verdict ordering him and four companies to pay five million yuan (S$1 million) to the author and apologise to her for copying her work. She had claimed that the plot of a drama by Yu was almost identical to her novel, Plum Blossom Scar. The drama was aired on Hunan TV last year.

She filed the lawsuit in April last year, asking Yu and four TV companies to apologise, stop the infringement and compensate her 20 million yuan, Xinhua reported.

On Weibo, she said that by April last year, she had written half of her TV script for Plum Blossom Scar and was preparing to start filming when she learnt that Hunan TV was airing Yu's drama.

She said she asked the station to cut the plagiarised parts or credit her novel for those parts, but the station still went ahead to air it as it was.

"It's not strange to be hurt by an enemy, but to be hurt by someone close is painful," she wrote. Her relationship with Hunan TV started 26 years ago, when they worked on Six Dreams, one of her TV adaptations.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on December 23, 2015, with the headline Chiung Yao pained by plagiarism case. Subscribe