Tiktok's other, smaller legal problem

Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co. v. Tiktok Inc., 2024 WL 1772833, No. 23-cv-06012-SI (N.D. Cal. Apr. 23, 2024)

Skipping the copyright and trade secrets part of the case. (In brief: Meishe argued that Tiktok copied its code via an employee who departed. The court found aspects of the copyright/§1202 claims claim insufficiently specifically pled and granted leave to amend, including to add sufficient detail to establish that the works at issue were not US works and thus exempt from the pre-suit registration requirement. The trade secret claims were likewise dismissed with leave to amend, including to specify what acts in furtherance of the offense were committed in the US.)

False designation of origin: Meishe alleged that “TikTok informs users that it owns and has proper rights to the code it uses in its applications”; defendants “have represented that they value intellectual property and would not infringe others’ intellectual property, but have done so as described in this Complaint” and defendants “willfully continued to represent the software as their own, not credited Meishe with being the owners or author of portions of Defendants’ products or code, and not stopped distributing infringing and misappropriated code.” This was classic Dastar. As stated in Luxul Technology Inc. v. Nectarlux, LLC, 78 F. Supp. 3d 1156 (N.D. Cal. 2015) “in this circuit, a reverse passing off claim requires the alteration of a product and a subsequent sale.”

False advertising: Meishe pointed to statements defendants made in their copyright notice at tiktok.com, in the ByteDance Code of Conduct, in TikTok’s Intellectual Property Policy, and in TikTok’s terms of service. But it wasn’t clear that any of these statements were made on the context of “commercial advertising or promotion” or how these statements were likely to influence purchasing decisions by consumers. The court granted leave to amend, but it’s hard to imagine how this gets plausible under the Lanham Act.