> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear.

I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyright in any case ... /sarcasm

I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent for extra kharma points.

It's not about right or wrong, it's about how many lawyers you can afford. If you can afford lots of lawyers, you can run out the clock, drain your opponents budgets, craft laws and lobby for their passage, and all sorts of creative ways of getting around doing the right thing.

A random creator in China in the early oughts wouldn't have a chance in hell against Nike or any other big corporations, trademark and copyright isn't and wasn't set up for foreign citizens to leverage IP against domestic entities. Without starting with a big legal team and a US corporation and having all the reams of paperwork and registrations and forms in triplicate, he just wasn't playing the same game. He should have been reimbursed or gotten a royalty, from a moral standpoint, but he didn't have any valid legal standing.

A court tried to be generous in the interpretation of the law in order to grant him his first victory, and that would probably have been a good precedent, but the law isn't really designed to be flexible like that - it's very rare that "the right thing" ends up congruent with how the law works in practice.

I’m not clear what the case against Nike was. Zhu did not create stick men. He wasn’t even the first to publish “stick fight” videos. He filed a trademark of some sort but you can’t take ownership over an entire class of art based on a trademark. Disney can stop me from using Mickey Mouse in my ads. They can’t stop me from animating a mouse.

Nike come out of the whole thing pretty badly. Why didn't they just pay him a few thousand dollars to do the work?