On February 13th, Meisho Technology announced that the Supreme People's Court has recently made a final judgment, upholding the infringement determination in the first instance judgment while changing the judgment on the low amount of damages compensation in the first instance judgment.

The second instance judgment ordered Tiktok and its affiliated companies to immediately stop infringing on the copyright of the American Photography SDK software, apologize to American Photography, Tiktok and an employee to immediately stop infringing on the technical secrets of American Photography, and the nine cases compensated for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling about 82.668 million yuan.

On the same day, Li Liang, vice president of Tiktok Group, replied in a microblog that an engineer who had worked in American Photography repeatedly used part of the code he had written in American Photography when writing code during his byte work (according to judicial identification, the proportion of relevant duplicate codes was very small, not more than 4% of American Photography software and 0.8% of Tiktok). This behavior is a serious violation and is explicitly prohibited by the company. Currently, the employee has also resigned. Li Liang stressed that before that, Tiktok had communicated with American Photography for many times and was willing to provide compensation to the other party, but American Photography put forward a claim for compensation that far exceeded the actual value of the relevant code. It once filed a claim of more than 2 billion yuan in the Chinese court, and the court finally supported the compensation amount of more than 80 million yuan. Li Liang also revealed that this incident reminds the company to strengthen management. 

At the company level, multiple compliance training sessions have been organized for technical personnel, and a systematic review of historical codes has also been conducted It is reported that the dispute between American Photography Company and Tiktok has lasted for many years. In May 2021, American Photography Company found that the audio and video editing and processing function codes of eight products (including clip and image, huge creativity, Faceu, Tu Bug, light camera, multi flash, volcano engine VESDK, etc.) under ByteDance copied a large number of American Photography SDK software with copyright. Based on the infringement of computer software copyright, American Photography Company filed a lawsuit to Beijing Intellectual Property Court and Beijing High People's Court, and filed a lawsuit against Tiktok Company and an employee for infringement of technical secrets. At the end of June 2023 and the end of May 2024, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court and the Beijing Higher People's Court made first instance judgments successively, finding that Tiktok Company and its affiliated companies infringed on the copyright of the American Photography SDK software, and ordered them to apologize to American Photography Company and compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling about 26.704 million yuan. Both parties are dissatisfied with the first instance judgment and have appealed to the Supreme People's Court. 

In February 2025, the Supreme People's Court made a final judgment, upholding the determination of infringement in the first instance judgment while changing the judgment on the low amount of damages compensation in the first instance judgment. In terms of infringement determination, since Tiktok Company and its affiliated companies refused to submit the software source code, the court finally determined that the accused software code plagiarism was valid according to the target code decompilation, comparison and identification and the similarity of software specific content; Tiktok Company and its affiliated companies contacted the software code of American Photography Company through an employee, and Tiktok Company and an employee violated the technical secrets of American Photography Company. According to the information, Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co., Ltd. was established on October 23, 2014, with Zheng Pengcheng as its legal representative. Through equity penetration, the largest shareholder of the company is China Digital Video Holdings Limited.

 According to business information, China Digital Video Holdings Limited, formerly known as Newtech Silicon Valley Video Technology Co., Ltd., was established in 1990. On September 2, 2015, China Digital Video Holdings Limited was registered and established in Hong Kong. On June 27, 2016, China Digital Video Holdings Limited was listed on the Growth Enterprise Market of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. At the close of today's Hong Kong stock market, the stock price of China Digital Video (08280. HK) was HKD 0.061. On February 11th, Beijing Meisha added multiple patents, including video editing methods and devices, sample generation methods, devices, systems, equipment, media, and program products, role-playing model training methods and devices, video commentary generation methods and devices, etc.