Xiaomi fired an employee who used the work of the artist without permission

Xiaomi admitted to using the work of an artist without his permission to promote his products and said that his employee had been fired.

Last night we reported that Xiaomi's Spanish website was using elements from three creations of the 3D artist Peter Tarka. Tarka said that it was "100% sure" that Xiaomi had used his work, and the elements seemed to align very clearly. At present, the company blames a single employee and claims that the incident is due to "failures in our approval process".

Xiaomi said she would strengthen her internal art approval processes "to prevent this from happening again," and asked Tarka to apologize. Tarka's work has since been removed from Xiaomi's website.

Tarka created a GIF showing how the elements of three works from his work combined to form Xiaomi's advertising. The main structure has been slightly modified and a chair and a suspension of two other rooms have been added around:

GIF: Peter Tarka

Worse, two of these pieces – including the chair and light were extracted – come from works that Tarka made to order from LG, one of Xiaomi's competitors for smartphones.

Although there have never been such blatant incidents before, Xiaomi constantly clones the work of others. Earlier this year, he recreated Apple's default wallpaper, MacOS, along with a feature to move the image between day and night. Its competitor MacBook Pro 2017 seemed almost identical to a MacBook Pro. And its stores have white walls, uniform lighting and wooden display tables, like an Apple store.

The full statement of Xiaomi is below:

After reviewing artist Peter Tarka's comments about the misuse of his works on Xiaomi Spain's website, Xiaomi determined that a designer had used Peter Tarka's drawing without permission. Xiaomi deleted the content of our website and decided to fire this employee with immediate effect. We sincerely apologize to Peter Tarka and for the failures of our approval process. Employee actions go against our company's values ​​of respecting intellectual property and we will further strengthen our internal approval processes to prevent this from happening again. We asked Peter Tarka to apologize.