It is reported that the lawsuit between Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co., Ltd. and TikTok will be heard in the U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California on October 27. The amount involved is as high as US$845 million. The lawsuit started in 2021, accusing former Meishe employees of joining ByteDance after leaving their jobs and using Meishe's source code for the video editing functions of TikTok and other Byte products.
U.S. District Judge Susan Ilston ruled that there were substantial disputes regarding Meishe's copyright and trade secret misappropriation. She dismissed TikTok’s motion for summary judgment while allowing the lawsuit against TikTok’s core intellectual property to continue.
Domestically, Meishe has filed multiple lawsuits against ByteDance and won. Meishe sued Byte in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court and the Beijing Higher People's Court for plagiarizing multiple software codes, with a claim amount of up to 2.274 billion yuan. The first-instance verdict found that multiple software products owned by Byte had plagiarized their codes, and ordered compensation of 6.27 million yuan. In May last year, the Beijing High Court determined that Douyin and Jianying software were infringing, and ordered compensation of 20.4347 million yuan. The second instance ultimately ordered ByteDance and its affiliates to stop the infringement, apologize, and compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling approximately 82.668 million yuan.
In the U.S. lawsuit, Meishe asked Byte to provide source code, financial data, usage data and other evidence, involving TikTok, Faceu, CapCut and other software. Byte argued that relevant evidence discovery is irrelevant, but Meishe has provided the line number identification of the copied Meishe source code in the TikTok Android version, and confirmed that former employees merged the Meishe source code into Byte's source code, and that this code was used in the US version of TikTok.
Li Liang, vice president of public relations for ByteDance, said that after the incident, the company strengthened its management, organized compliance training for technical personnel and investigated historical codes.