By GB News (World News) | Created at 2026-07-30 06:34:37 | Updated at 2026-07-30 08:32:32
2 hours ago
The owners of Peppa Pig have secured a major legal victory against a Vietnamese firm behind a cartoon character accused of being an "imposter".
Mr Justice Smith, sitting at the High Court, determined this week that SConnect, the firm responsible for the character "Wolfoo", had unlawfully taken bits of sound from Peppa Pig episodes in what he described as a "prolific" and "long-standing" fashion.
The judge ordered that every video featuring Wolfoo must be removed by 4pm on Monday.
The legal dispute stretches back to 2022, when Hasbro and Astley Baker Davies Ltd, the original creators of Peppa Pig, launched proceedings against SConnect in London.
The claimants alleged the Vietnamese company had sought to mislead Wolfoo's young audience thinking the cartoon canine was either identical to or associated with Peppa Pig.
The legal team first concentrated on the visual resemblance between the two characters - but Hasbro and Astley Baker Davies Ltd shifted their focus to the audio content used in Wolfoo videos.
Justice Smith said the copying was "extensive, seemingly endemic at least so far as the English language Wolfoo videos are concerned".
SConnect contested the infringement allegations, though it acknowledged that certain Wolfoo videos produced prior to mid-2020 had incorporated Peppa Pig audio.
A High Court judge determined this week that SConnect had unlawfully taken sound clips from Peppa Pig
The company attributed this to an independent third-party contractor who had allegedly used the clips without SConnect's knowledge.
It said all offending content had been deleted and that everything produced after mid-2020 relied solely on in-house recordings.
The judge dismissed the third-party argument as "irrelevant" and noted that while numerous infringing videos had indeed been taken down, others had simply been transferred to different channels.
He also found that the assertion about all new audio being created internally could be "disproved".
Court analysis revealed that Peppa Pig audio appeared in every one of the 92 English-language Wolfoo videos examined, as well as in roughly three-quarters of the foreign-language content sampled.
The judge ordered that every video featuring Wolfoo must be removed by 4pm on Monday
YOUTUBE/WOLFOO FAMILY
SConnect attempted to restrict the scope of the ruling to only those videos included in the sample, but Mr Justice Smith determined that all Wolfoo videos must be pulled from the web.
The company further argued that the geographical reach of the order was excessively wide, yet the judge confirmed it would extend across all 166 World Trade Organisation member states, encompassing the UK, EU, US and Vietnam.
Andrew Lee, partner and head of intellectual property at Brandsmiths, the law firm acting for Hasbro, described it as a "significant judgment" to the BBC.
Peppa Pig is available "in hundreds of countries around the world, and this was obviously a major problem for the brand because of the scale of Wolfoo," he said.
The snorting British icon has exploded into one of the world's most recognised children's carton characters
GETTY
"By bringing the claim in the UK courts, which was our home territory, and because the defendants had activity in the United Kingdom even though they were based in Vietnam, we were able to persuade the court to hear the case on a wider scale."
"So it was about trying to protect the Peppa Pig brand in one forum, rather than having to bring actions in every single country."
The snorting British icon first appeared on Channel 5 in 2004 - and has since exploded into one of the world's most recognised children's carton characters.
In 2019, US toy giant Hasbro bought the company behind Peppa Big, Entertainment One, in a deal worth a reported £3.3billion.
