Picture a pristine village at a crystal clear lake in the Austrian Alps. Now get rid of the snowy mountains and replace them with yellow hills. Then strip the lake and substitute it with a muddy pool. Add some polluted air of Chinese industry for good measure. Exactly this was done by China Metal Mine Group who copied the whole Austrian village of Hallstatt and built it in Boluo (博罗), Guangdong province, to sell the houses to wealthy Chinese families. The city of Hallstatt perceived it at first as an Alptraum (=nightmare in German) and considered to pursue legal actions to protect their UNESCO world cultural heritage site against this copycat. Then they changed their mind and use the appropriation by the Chinese project developers as an opportunity…
Hallstatt takes the copycat action as a compliment, decided to sign a friendship treaty and uses this fact in their new slogan: “Hallstatt: Your holiday place in Austria, Millionfold photographed – once copied – never reached.“, see here. On the homepage of the promotion site there is a slide-show which includes two pictures with Chinese tourists, which obviously has become a new target group for Hallstatt. The Chinese version of Hallstatt will be opened on June 2, 2012. If Hallstatt decided to sue the copycat village, it could have been a problematic route because many buildings exist longer than 50 years after the death of the architect, which means that China might consider the copyright of the architecture part of the public domain, irrespective of the copyright in the country of origin. Besides, many buildings exist also longer than the 70 years after the death of the architect, which means that also the Austrian copyright has already expired. Unfair competition could be another difficult route.
Read the Vienna Times article here.