A Xiaomi Employee Was Sacked After Being Accused Of Using Artist’s Work Without Permission

Xiaomi admitted that the company had promoted its new products by using the work of a young Polish digital artist named Peter Tarka without permission. The responsible employee has reportedly been sacked.

At night on June 20, The Verge reported that on its Spanish website, Xiaomi used elements in three works created by Peter Tarka from Poland. According to the digital artist, he was completely sure that the Chinese electronics company had already used his pieces of work. However, it blamed only one employee for this incident which is caused by “lapses in our approval process.”

In addition, the company announces its new plans to boost the internal process of the art approval “to prevent this from happening again.” Xiaomi also contacted with Tarka to give him its apology. The artist’s work has been deleted from the company’s Spanish website.

To prove what he said, Tarka designed a GIF to show how elements in his work’s pieces were combined to create Xiaomi’s ad. There haven’t been lots of changes in the main structure, and he also added a hanging light and a chair into his 02 other pieces.

That’s not the worst part of this story! Among his work’s pieces, two pieces were designed as required by LG, a rival of Xiaomi in the smartphone market.

Although such the incidents haven’t been unprecedented before, Xiaomi reportedly cloned the work of others in the past. At the beginning of 2019, the Chinese company copied the default wallpaper of Apple’s MacOS, as well as a feature to change daytime into nighttime of the image. Besides, its product released in 2017 to compete with the MacBook Pro was allegedly similar to Apple’s product. In terms of Xiaomi's stores, they are designed in the same style as Apple stores: wooden display tables, lighting, and white walls.

Here is the full statement of Xiaomi: