Unlicensed Angry Birds Attraction Opens in Hunan

12 September 2012

Need to relieve some stress, and shooting at little green pigs on your iPhone isn’t quite doing it? Instead, head to Changsha in China’s Hunan province, some 660 km north of Hong Kong, where a month long stress reduction festival features a real-life, completely-unlicensed Angry Birds attraction.

Just like in the mobile version of the game, players use a slingshot to knock over structures, sending the pigs to their deaths. The game is part of an attraction called Window of the World.

“This [Angry Birds park] serves as a method for people to purge themselves and to gain happiness,” a park official told Chinese gaming website Gamersky.com.

The idea of an Angry Birds theme park is not a new one. When Finnish technology company Rovio Entertainment, which owns the popular game, was in talks earlier this year to receive major funding from investors, Disney was believed by analysts to be a potential partner, although no names were made public.

“I can see how Disney would take Angry Birds and turn them into a theme-park ride and a movie,” Michael Pachter, managing director of research at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles told Bloomberg. “Zynga could take Angry Birds and make it into FarmVille.”

Brent Randall, writing on the pop culture website CinemaBlend.com, notes that Rovio apparently does not have a problem with what Window of the World is doing. “Although they have hinted that they’d kind of appreciate it if the park partnered with them instead of just doing their own thing,” says Randall. “After all, it’s pretty heavy trademark infringement.”

The festival opened September 1 and is scheduled to end at the end of the month.

Patent Registrations Hit 2.0 per 10,000

The number of invention patents per 10,000 people in China has reached 2.0, up from 1.7 per 10,000 at the end 2010, according to China’s State Intellectual Protection Office.

“The main reason [for the increase] is that China granted 48.2% more invention patents in the first half of this year,” said to a member of SIPO’s planning and development department.

As of the end of June 2011, SIPO has granted nearly 2.5 million patents, 627,000 of which are for inventions, up 12.6% and 11% from 2.216 million and 565,000 of the end 2010 respectively. Of the 627,000 granted invention patents, 302,000 were granted to domestic enterprises and 325,000 were granted to foreigners.

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