Peppa Pig Owners Win Copyright Case Against Wolfoo

A High Court judge in London has ordered all videos featuring the animated character Wolfoo to be removed from platforms including YouTube, after ruling that the cartoon illegally copied audio from Peppa Pig, the BBC reported.

Wolfoo, a Vietnamese animation about a young wolf living with his family, has accumulated hundreds of millions of views online. One of its YouTube channels has more than 13 million subscribers.

What the judge found

Mr Justice Smith ruled in favour of Hasbro, which owns the rights to Peppa Pig, in its case against Wolfoo's makers SConnect. He described the copying as "prolific" and "long-standing".

The infringement centred on short audio clips of Peppa and her family saying words such as "hooray!", which were reused in Wolfoo videos. The judge concluded that the evidence of "copying of the audio clips is compelling".

His ruling required all Wolfoo videos to be taken down before 16:00 BST on Monday.

A case built on sound, not pictures

Hasbro and Peppa Pig's creators Astley Baker Davies Ltd first brought the action in London in 2022. Their complaint initially covered Wolfoo's appearance and artwork as well as its audio.

The companies then narrowed their case to focus on the sound. The reasoning was practical: proving that specific audio clips had been lifted directly is more straightforward than arguing that a cartoon wolf's design copies a cartoon pig's.

That choice appears to have shaped the outcome. Visual similarity between children's animation characters is often difficult to establish in court, while identical audio leaves a clearer trail.

The argument about young viewers

Central to the claimants' case was the age of the audience. They argued that SConnect had tried "to deceive the young Wolfoo viewership, most aged between two and five, into believing that Wolfoo is the same character as Peppa Pig" or was connected to it, according to the judge's written ruling.

That framing matters for how such disputes are judged. Where an audience is old enough to distinguish between competing brands, confusion is harder to demonstrate. Where viewers are toddlers, the threshold is different.

The scale of the takedown order — covering an entire catalogue rather than specific infringing clips — reflects how comprehensively the judge found the copying had run through the series.

Reporting basis: BBC Entertainment.