According to the presiding judge, this is the first case in which the original defendant and the defendant reached a settlement without going through formal proceedings in many intellectual property disputes between China and the United States since 1992 China joined the Berne Convention.
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On the one hand, it is a world-famous American examination authority, and on the other hand, it is a little-known training institution in China. According to common sense, why did the two sides, who should have stood on the upstream and downstream of the interest chain of "you test, I train", launch an intellectual property lawsuit, but why did they finally drop it? This matter has to start from both sides.
Reconciliation between the two sides
For the general public in China, GMAC may be a strange combination of English letters, but when it comes to the GMAT exam sponsored by GMAC, it will affect all applicants in the world who want to study MBA and other MBA programs in the world's top business schools. By the end of 2009, GMAT has been adopted as the entrance examination by 65,438+0,500 business schools and 65,438+0,800 business administration learning programs around the world, including not only top business schools in Europe and America such as Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, IMD in Switzerland, INSEAD in France, LBS, LSE, Oxford and Cambridge, but also well-known domestic schools such as Central Europe, Yangtze River and Peking University International. In other words, GMAC is more like the guardian of more than 65,438+0,500 business schools and 65,438+0,800 MBA and other business research projects around the world, including Harvard, Wharton and Stanford. For hundreds of thousands of candidates who are interested in applying for MBA and other business study programs in the world's top business schools, GMAT scores have become the main criterion to evaluate whether the applicants have the MBA program postgraduate qualifications in major business schools around the world (including independent business schools such as China Europe, Yangtze River and Peking University International in China). Taking the GMAT exam hosted by GMAC and getting a high score of 700+ is equivalent to getting a "golden stepping stone" for the world's top business schools. Moreover, the GMAT score directly determines the applicant's scholarship.
The origin of the intersection of GMAC and Posen is the GMAT exam.
As a rising star who focuses on foreign language test training such as GMAT, TOEFL, SAT and LSAT, before 2008, Bosen's name hardly appeared in the media with public influence, nor was it as well known to the public as his old rival New Oriental. Even in the overseas examination and training circle, Bosen's popularity is far less than that of Guan Weidong, the founder of Bosen and the former lecturer of GMAT/LSAT in New Oriental. In 2009, Bosen gradually became famous among GMAT candidates, because in 2005-07, Bosen got a high score of GMAT700+ after training and gradually entered the top business schools in the United States. According to a survey of business graduate students studying in the United States, the top 20 business schools in the United States only admit about 200 MBA students from China every year. However, according to the official data released by GMAC, in 2008, 1 1287 people passed the GMAT in China. According to the data provided by Bosen, in 2008, more than 70 Bosen GMAT students got the OFFER from the top 20 business schools in the United States, that is to say, 1 of every three China students studying in the top business schools in the United States came from Bosen. Because GMAC has no office or agency in China, Bosen, who is unknown in China, has attracted GMAC's attention because of these high-scoring candidates from China who are studying in famous American universities: they recalled their GMAT questions and shared all the sets with their teacher Guan Weidong's name "GWD" for short. Furthermore, GMAT candidates regard it as "cheats" and "real questions" in major portals and test preparation forums, while GMAC finds the initiator Guan Weidong on the Internet according to the letter "GWD", and then finds the "invisible big family" Bosen in China GMAT training ground.
Behind reconciliation
Because of the high gold content in the GMAT exam, GMAC stipulates that the registration fee for the global unified exam is as high as 250 US dollars, equivalent to 2025 yuan. Because the exam stipulates that candidates can have multiple re-examinations, GMAC sends transcripts in multiple exams according to the highest business school allocated to candidates, and the exam registration fee is also charged repeatedly according to the number of applicants. Therefore, the cost of taking the GMAT exam is definitely not small, especially for China candidates who take the exam repeatedly in order to achieve ideal results. In 2008, China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) had 1 1287 people/time to take the exam, and GMAC earned tens of millions of yuan in exam fees from China every year, which did not include other income such as deferred exam registration fees and exam materials fees. Affected by the global financial crisis, the number of people applying for business schools around the world has exploded. Compared with 2007, the growth rate of the total number of candidates in China in 2008 reached a record high, reaching 47%. China is really a big market for GMAC. Especially in China, a market with the fastest growing number of applicants and the largest number of duplicate applicants in the world, GMAC has been focusing on it. Seven years ago, ETS (Education Examination Service) teamed up with GMAC and New Oriental for the first time to sue New Oriental in China on the grounds that New Oriental "copied, published and distributed its GMAT, TOEFL and GRE test questions with copyright and trademark rights without consent", which infringed its copyright and trademark rights. New Oriental finally compensated ETS and GMAC for economic losses and litigation costs totaling RMB 3.74 million. As the founder and pioneer lecturer of GMAT and LSAT training in New Oriental, Guan Weidong witnessed the feud between New Oriental and GMAC seven years ago.
Seven years later, things have changed. In the United States, GMAT examination institutions were taken back from ETS by GMAC and handed over to ACT. In China, Guan Weidong, the pioneer lecturer of GMAT in New Oriental, started his own business, combining the training mode of GMAT from a single face-to-face teaching to the teaching system of FMA. The training fee far exceeds the pricing of 3,000 yuan in New Oriental, reaching 6,800 yuan/person. It is precisely because GMAC allows candidates to repeat the exam many times, and GMAT adopts the same question bank method according to a period of time, which has become the only controversial point in the litigation process between the original defendant and the defendant: GMAC believes that it is precisely because of the spread of "GWD" sets of questions that the high score legend of Bosen training has been created; Bosen insists that the spread of "GWD" has become a group behavior on the Internet. Every candidate can easily get the content of GWD from relevant websites for their pre-test training, but the proportion of candidates who get 700+ high marks is still only about 7%, and there is no absolute change. Therefore, Bosen's unique FMA teaching system is a sharp weapon to help candidates get high marks: GMAT, as an entrance examination for business schools, is different from GRE, a popular postgraduate examination in the United States. More precisely, GMAT is a business thinking test, which puts candidates in a test that is close to the real business decision-making thinking situation. Bosen's FMA teaching system helps candidates to quickly establish a general thinking system that can understand GMAT through just four days of face-to-face teaching. Furthermore, it is suggested that candidates use a large number of "remote model test" questions to conduct simulated computer tests, and at the same time, arrange industry famous teachers Guan Weidong and Ying Ji to answer questions on the test difficulties at a fixed time every week. Therefore, Bosen insists that he is superior to educational thinking and training mode. Because this teaching system helps candidates to greatly shorten the preparation time and reduce the number of exams. Therefore, this also affects GMAC's interest in obtaining the repeated inspection fee from GMAT, which is the core reason for bringing a lawsuit against Bosen. On the 2m-thick prosecution materials submitted by GMAC to the court, all GMAT questions circulated on the Internet are generally called "GWD", and candidates who share GMAT exam contents and problem-solving ideas are also called "GWDers". The core content of the indictment is the infringement of the content of GWD and the infringement of GWDers. In the end, in this lawsuit, GMAC, as the copyright owner of GMAT, not only crossed the GMAT Examination Agency Law, but also did not point to New Oriental. But pointed the finger at Posen, which shows its importance.
Compared with the scene of ETS suing New Oriental in 2003, the more dramatic scene in this case is that Bosen, as the defendant, readily admitted the tort liability at the first court session, but said that the infringement was more out of helplessness, because even at that time, there was no official channel in China to directly obtain GMAT preparation materials, and it was really out of helplessness for the majority of candidates to recall the examination questions as classroom materials. He has repeatedly expressed his sincere willingness to settle, which almost caused his agent ad litem's consternation and rigorous suggestions, and even surprised the plaintiff. The defendant's sincerity in respecting intellectual property rights and admitting mistakes became the direct reason for the settlement of this transnational intellectual property dispute.
(This article Source: Netease)