A Chinese science fiction writer on Wednesday took U.S. movie giant 20th Century Fox Film Corporation to court over allegations of copyright infringement.

The Intermediate People's Court of Dongying, in east China's Shandong Province, began hearing the case on Wednesday.

The writer, 43-year-old Li Jianmin, said 20th Century Fox's movie The Day After Tomorrow copied the creative concept and the plots of two plays he completed in 2001 and 2002.

Li said The Day After Tomorrow, the blockbuster movie in which much of the world is destroyed by disasters caused by global warming, has 308 scenes that were described in his plays.

In March last year, Li lodged the lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, director of the movie Roland Emmerich and five Chinese companies that imported, distributed and showed the movie. The court accepted the suit last April.

Li, who is making no claim for compensation, said he just wanted to be respected for his work. He has requested the court to acknowledge copyright infringement by defendants and that they pay all the legal costs.

Yang Jun, lawyer for 20th Century Fox, told the court that some scenes were similar to Li's plays in that descriptions of floods, storms and glaciers are usually alike, and "any writer may create such scenes".

She denied the U.S. company had infringed on Li's copyright.

It is not known, if the accusation were true, how 20th Century Fox obtained the plays of Li Jianmin, who said he showed one of the plays to friends after it was finished in October 2001 and brought both plays to Beijing in November 2002 for a contest.

Li admitted he had no proof that the U.S. company had access to his plays.

The court did not reach a verdict on Wednesday.

The case comes in the same week that the U.S. moved to file a case at the World Trade Organisation against China over intellectual property rights (IPR).

A dispute over copyright violation also came to a head this week with Chinese Internet service provider Sohu.com accusing U.S.-based Google of infringing aspects of its pinyin-inputting software.

Professor Cui Lihong with the Law School of Shandong University said foreign companies have frequently sued Chinese over intellectual property rights, but now more and more Chinese began to seek IPR protection by lawsuits, which shows the awareness of IPR protection is on the rise in the country.

He said China has exerted immense efforts on IPR protection since it became a WTO member in 2001, and he believed the Shandong court will deliver a fair verdict of the case according to law.

The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court said it accepted 4,535 IPR cases in the past five years, including 981 cases involving at least one foreign party.

It said foreign parties have won nearly 80 percent of the civil cases on IPR and 60 percent of the administrative cases on IPR.

Last year, 20th Century Fox teamed up with Walt Disney, Paramount Pictures, Universal City Studios and Columbia Pictures to file lawsuits against a Beijing company and one of its retail shops for selling DVDs of their 16 movies without copyright authorization.

A Beijing court ruled in December that the defendants infringed the copyright of the five U.S. film companies and ordered them to pay 164,000 yuan (One U.S. dollar equals 7.7270 yuan) in compensation.

Source: Xinhua