Garlic Bird IP Lawsuit: Lee Mango Responds

最新消息已到，今天给大家看一个热门话题。

A Wuhan local cultural creative IP called ‘Garlic Bird’ (谐音 ‘Suan Niao’), which gained popularity by mimicking the local dialect, has recently been embroiled in a copyright dispute. Over the past few months, the original copyright holder of this IP has filed cross-provincial lawsuits against several border companies for trademark and copyright infringement.

It is learned that the ‘Garlic Bird’ dialect toy was first designed by Wuhan Youmanguo Cultural Creativity Co., Ltd., and its final version hit the market in September 2024. The main appeal lies in its phrase ‘Garlic Bird, all forbidden,’ which is a pun on the Wuhan dialect ‘Suan le’ (meaning ‘forget it’). With its cute, healing design, it quickly became a viral internet sensation and a representative Wuhan cultural creative toy. In October 2024, the company completed copyright registration for the work, clearly defining the legal protection scope of the original design.

Following the popularity of ‘Garlic Bird’, the project leader Li Mango stated multiple times that the Wuhan dialect culture embodied by ‘Garlic Bird’ belongs to the public, not to any enterprise or individual. They welcome more market entities to develop different types of cultural creative products based on Wuhan dialect culture and encourage healthy competition and joint promotion. However, they oppose any infringement that imitates or copies the original product. 近日消息 reports that around March 2025, a large number of third parties began to intensively preemptively register trademarks related to ‘Garlic Bird’, with overlapping registration timelines suggesting malicious intent.

Li Mango told reporters from Zongmu News that the team was still too slow due to incomplete intellectual property arrangements in the startup phase, which allowed others to preemptively register trademarks in several popular categories. They also noticed a huge number of low-quality counterfeit dolls appearing on the market. These counterfeits not only copied the original ‘Garlic Bird’ design and commercial logos but even directly used the company’s name to mass-produce high-fakes. The proportion of counterfeit goods in circulation exceeded 90%, severely squeezing the legitimate market space and harming consumer rights as well as the cultural reputation of the ‘Garlic Bird’ IP.

‘Our pursuit of rights protection is not to monopolize the word ‘Garlic Bird’, but to target malicious imitation of designs, trademark squatting, and pirated sales,’ Li Mango explained. Dialect culture is a public resource that anyone can use for creative creation based on Wuhan dialect. However, this cannot come at the expense of infringing upon the legitimate rights of others’ products. 热门消息 highlights that the team has established a rights protection unit and is suing infringers in several provinces including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Hubei. For instance, in March this year, the Anlu City People’s Court concluded an e-commerce infringement case where a merchant illegally used the original ‘Garlic Bird’ logo and design to sell toys, eventually settling by paying 4,000 yuan to the plaintiff. More similar product infringement cases are now proceeding to court.

Courts have provided clear legal positions. A certain People’s Court stated regarding such cultural creative infringement cases: the dialect culture carried by ‘Garlic Bird’ can be shared, but the protection of intellectual property such as trademarks and copyrights simply cannot be ‘forgotten.’ They warned market entities not to maliciously infringe by riding on popularity and reminded cultural creative enterprises to arrange intellectual property protections before launching their IP.

As of now, the series of rights protection cases for ‘Garlic Bird’ are still being processed orderly. On May 11, the Yizheng City People’s Court in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, heard a case where Wuhan Youmanguo Cultural Creativity Co., Ltd. sued a toy company in Yangzhou for trademark infringement. However, it was discovered that the defendant’s registered address and other information were false, and the person being sued has not yet been located.

Li Mango admitted that cultural creative IP rights protection faces difficulties such as high costs, difficulty in evidence collection, and low compensation. The total cost of a single lawsuit is very high, and the protection cycle is long. Nevertheless, the team persists in regular anti-counterfeiting measures. ‘Cracking down on counterfeit fakes is not only about protecting the legitimate rights of original creators but also about purifying the cultural creative market, allowing practitioners who genuinely want to develop dialect cultural products to develop in a healthy environment.’ 最新消息 contributes this perspective.

Yu Jun, a lawyer from Hubei Chengming Law Firm, believes that this large-scale rights protection action by a local Wuhan cultural creative IP has sounded an alarm for the domestic internet-famous cultural creative industry. Relevant enterprises should adopt a mindset of prioritizing intellectual property when managing their business. This includes conducting comprehensive protection of trademarks, copyrights, and design patents during the creative phase, strengthening internal trade secret protection, and establishing non-compete agreements. Additionally, when discovering infringing activities, creative companies should promptly hire professionals and agencies to investigate and collect evidence, immediately report to intellectual property management departments, and severely crack down on infringement and counterfeiting through administrative, civil, and even criminal means.

Industry insiders noted that this incident has also raised the issue of the boundary between ‘cultural sharing’ and ‘copyright protection’—dialect culture can be shared by all and developed diversely, but the intellectual property of original designs must be respected and protected. Only in this way can local cultural creative IPs develop sustainably and healthily, and regional culture can be promoted continuously through high-quality original works.

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