Copyright

Maybe you've heared that some years ago, a story about a fake Disneyland amusement park in China made some rumors in the media. As I love good fakes, I obviously had to take a look. The amusement park in question is Shijingshan Amusement Park ( 北京石景山游乐园) and is located in Beijing. It can easily be reached, as it has its own metro station.

The park had the advertisement slogan "Disneyland is too far to go" some years ago and some images of Mickey Mouse and other Disney figures in the park boosted the story (see Wikipedia for details). Also, like all Disneylands, the Park has a Cinderella castle. It seems in the meantime things have changed - we didn't see any Disney charakters there. The only thing that still reminds of the story is the Cinderella castle - but as much as Disneys lawyers might want this, Cinderella is not a Disney invention after all.
I even found a fake Mickey Mouse (at least I think it was fake, it looked somehow wrong) in Beijing, but it was not in the amusement park, it was in the olympic village.

The story of a fake Disneyland seems highly exaggerated. The Cinderella is probably no issue at all, as I doubt there's anything that makes it a special "Disney-Cinderella". I'm not sure if there was a copyright violation at all: The fake Mickey Mouse and other figures in combination with the solgan could probably be considered parody - which is legally allowed in most of the world's copyright laws.

The park itself was kind of weird. Large parts of it were in really bad shape. Some looked like a construction site, many parts were not operational. On the other hand, other parts of it were really well-designed. One could hardly imagine that this was the same park.

A nice thing to mention: They had a dance dance revolution like arcade machine - but the game on it was StepMania - a free software game. I think this is the first time I saw a free software game in an arcade machine.

Unlike most european amusement parks, the pricing concept here is different - the entrance fee costs almost nothing (10 Yuan, approximately 1 €), but you pay for every ride.

Pictures from the park