In a final judgment, a court can determine the important issues asserted and defended by the parties after hearing the debates between the parties, even if such important issues are outside the subject matter of the present litigation. Unless such final decision obviously violates the law or the parties can provide new evidence sufficient to override such final judgment, for the same important issues, the same parties may not in another lawsuit propose opposite assertions, and courts cannot make a different judgment. This law comes from the good faith principle as well as the fairness among the litigants, in order to prevent the repeating occurrence of the dispute and to reach the goal of resolving related disputes in one litigation. This effect of judgment (or binding force) is called “collateral estoppel” (issue preclusion)(See the Supreme Court decision No. 2007-Tai-Shang-307, 2007-Tai-Shang-1782 and 2007-Tai-Shang-2569) A final civil judgment by the Taiwan High Court, Taichung Branch (No. 2007-SU-Yi-33) has determined that the disputed figure was a pictorial and graphical work created by B, the legal representative of the appellant, A Co., and that the figure on the web page of C Co. was an unauthorized derivative work of such disputed figure. (See the Fact and Reasoning V(1)1-4 of the decision.) In another final civil judgment by the Taiwan Taichung District Court (No. 2008-Zhong-Zhi-2), the court determined that the appellant here had acquired an exclusive license of Figures 2 to 4 during the above-mentioned period. (See the Reasoning III(1) of the decision.) Here in this case, the Appellees, C Co. and D, did not propose new evidence sufficient to override the previous decisions, so they may not make opposite assertions, nor can this Court make a different decision. Therefore, the appellant’s exclusive rights to reproduce his figures and pictures and to publicly transmit those works were infringed by the appellee D’s act of transmitting the disputed figures and pictures from the server database of C Co. to the reproductive users’ web pages at the web address of E Co.

Copyright Act: Article 88Civil Code: Article 28; Article 184, Paragraph 1 (front-end)