The owners of Peppa Pig, the billion-dollar rosy-cheeked global phenomenon, are suing a Vietnamese studio that created a hugely popular YouTube series based on an animated wolf family.
Entertainment One (eOne), the London-listed former owner of Peppa Pig which was acquired by US toy company Hasbro for £3.3 billion in 2019, has filed a claim against Sconnect in the London High Court in collaboration with Astley Baker Davies, the company formed by the creators of the children’s character.
The action, brought by London-based law firm and intellectual property experts Brandsmiths, relates to allegations of ‘pass off and copyright infringement’ relating to Sconnect’s library of thousands of YouTube videos and the booming commodity trade.
The claim form, which gives brief details of the case, also alleges that Sconnect is infringing six trademarks relating to the use of Peppa Pig’s name, images and references in its content to push its own children’s franchises by association.
The target of the lawsuit is Sconnect’s Wolfoo franchise, which revolves around the main character, Wolfoo, “a little five-year-old wolf living on a hill in a small American town” and his family and friends. Wolfoo quickly grew to become a major hit on YouTube among the same demographic of two- to eight-year-olds that catapulted Peppa to become one of the biggest preschool brands in the world. The lawsuit was first reported by Variety.
Sconnect has three official Wolfoo YouTube channels, with nearly 30 million subscribers who have access to thousands of three-minute episodes available in languages ranging from French to Bahasa, as well as other properties such as series in stop-motion WOA Luka and 2-D animation Max’s puppy.
In a sponsored post, the company boasts that “Wolfoo dominates YouTube for kids”and declares its entire portfolio of properties attracts 2.5 billion online views per month.
In online forums and articles, Wolfoo is often referred to as similar to Peppa Pig. In 2019, eOne sued a number of people for counterfeit goods, both in China and in its largest market, the United States, to protect its annual toy sales of over $1 billion.
The lovable character, who made headlines in November when Boris Johnson mentioned a trip to the Peppa Pig World theme park in a ‘rambling’ speech to business leaders at a Confederation of British Industry (CBI), first appeared in 2004 as a five-minute children’s animation on Channel 5
Peppa Pig, which is now broadcast in over 40 languages and available in over 180 territories worldwide, was created in 2000 by Mark Baker, Neville Astley and Phil Davies.
The trio, who became friends while working in the animation department at Middlesex Polytechnic in the mid-1980s, are now multi-millionaires and have walked away from the business.
The huge appeal of the Peppa Pig franchise prompted Labor to try to piggyback on the cartoon character’s fame ahead of the 2010 election. The trio turned down the invitation.