Hasbro has won a copyright infringement case over Peppa Pig after a London High Court judge found that the animated children’s series Wolfoo illegally used audio from the preschool franchise, according to The BBC.
The ruling orders all videos featuring Wolfoo to be removed from online platforms, including YouTube. The Guardian reported that the judge said the copying had been “prolific,” “longstanding” and that the evidence of “copying of the audio clips is compelling.”
Hasbro, which owns the rights to Peppa Pig, sued SConnect, the Vietnamese company behind Wolfoo, over videos that used short audio clips of Peppa and her family saying words including “Hooray.” The court action also involved Peppa Pig creators Astley Baker Davies.
SConnect denied copyright infringement and said videos made before mid-2020 included Peppa Pig audio because an independent third-party contractor used those sounds without the company’s knowledge. The company also said later videos used original in-house sounds and that all infringing videos had been removed.
The judge rejected that defense, finding Peppa Pig sound clips in all 92 English-language Wolfoo videos examined and in 75% of the foreign-language videos reviewed. The court also said blaming third-party contractors was “irrelevant” and that the claim about post-mid-2020 in-house audio “can be disproved.”
The judge also rejected SConnect’s argument that any removal order should apply only to the videos examined in the case, writing that the copying was “extensive, seemingly endemic at least so far as the English-language Wolfoo videos are concerned.” Wolfoo launched in 2018 and follows a young wolf who lives with his family. The series has drawn hundreds of millions of online views across YouTube, YouTube Kids and the official Wolfoo World website, and has been dubbed into languages including Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish. Like Peppa Pig, it targets young children ages two to seven.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
