April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day. On the 25th, Analysys Data released the "White Paper on Copyright Protection of Chinese Online Literature" (hereinafter referred to as the "White Paper"). The "White Paper" shows that the scale of China's digital entertainment core industry will reach 683.52 billion yuan in 2020, of which the online literature market will reach 28.84 billion yuan. Industry revenue mainly comes from user payment and copyright operations. For the online literature industry, copyright operation is undoubtedly the core content. What is the basic situation of copyright in my country's online literature industry today? What are the problems facing? What is the solution?
Increasing difficulty in fighting piracy in the Internet age
Gong Jianghui, an associate professor at the School of Economics and Business Administration of Beijing Normal University, has a pen name "Qi Orange" in the network literature circle. Since 2011, Qi Orange has published a series of novels on industrial themes such as "Industrial Overlord" and "Material Empire" on the Chinese website of Qi Qi. According to his observation, the copyright of online literary works has been infringed mainly in two situations: one is that the content or story is stolen and adapted into another work; the other is that it is published on a website that is not authorized by the author.
Gong Jianghui believes that the objective reason for the piracy of online literature is the low threshold. "The difficulty of copying text is small, and the technical requirements for the platform for storing and publishing pirated novels are also low. Unlike pirated videos, which require a lot of storage space and sufficient bandwidth. In addition, some literary websites privately encourage authors to plagiarize excellent works from other websites by washing The manuscript was redesigned and published on its own website."
"Some pirated websites usually provide content for free, attracting people to advertise, and form profit transfer. If this kind of advertising mechanism continues to exist, it will be difficult to pinch the source of piracy." said Cui Guobin, deputy dean of Tsinghua University Law School.
According to Analysys data analysis, in recent years, the development of mobile payment and digital content has promoted the popularization of online reading, and has also brought opportunities for piracy. "As cloud computing has landed in many fields, distributed storage and distributed computing technologies can achieve the massive data processing capabilities required by reading platforms, but pirate platforms can also take advantage of this to establish sites and attract users. Pirates can also use mobile terminals Transcoding, deep linking, website aggregation, and text extraction technologies provide users with pirated content, which makes it easy for users to read through multiple types of media," said Analysys Data Analyst.
In Cui Guobin's view, publishing houses in the traditional era are manageable and controllable, and piracy is relatively easy to be suppressed. In the network environment, infringers are scattered, and they are held accountable one by one, and the cost is high. "It's useless to stipulate responsibilities, and there are laws that can be actually enforced to be effective. Therefore, it is difficult to fight piracy in the Internet age."
Coordinated protection to promote the healthy development of the industry
According to CNNIC’s "47th Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status", as of December 2020, the number of Chinese online literature users reached 460 million, a year-on-year increase of 2.2%. Compared with the rapid growth from 2017 to 2018, the user scale of online literature gradually tends to grow steadily after 2019, which marks the beginning of a mature stage of industry development. In the future, as the influence of online literature IP adaptation continues to expand, it will cover more user markets and scenarios. While expanding the product form of online literature, it will also attract more audiences of adapted works to read the original.
"The product characteristics of online literature make copyright the most important source of IP in the industry chain," said Cheng Wu, CEO of China Reading Group. He believes that online literature authors and works have abundant reserves, which have obvious advantages in production costs compared to comics, animation, and film and television works. Online literary stories are rich in content, more delicate in portraying characters and plots, and can be long or short, laying a good foundation for subsequent adaptations. More importantly, the long-term continuous update of online literature helps cultivate user stickiness, accumulate high-value fan groups, establish long-term connections with fans, obtain continuous fan feedback, and promote the optimization of the content of the work.
Since the entire commercialization process of online literature from creation and publication to film and television adaptation and game adaptation all relies on copyright, copyright protection has also become the core of the healthy and upward development of the industry's ecology. How can we better protect the copyright of online literature?
Action has been taken at the legislative level. On June 1, 2021, the newly revised "Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China" will come into effect. The revised Copyright Law completes the relevant provisions on copyright protection in cyberspace; it refines the administrative law enforcement functions of the copyright management department. For example, it is stipulated that the copyright management department can use inquiry when investigating suspected violations of copyright and copyright-related rights. Methods such as parties, sealing up or detaining places and articles suspected of illegal activities have further enriched the supervision methods of the copyright management department and strengthened the supervision of administrative law enforcement.
"In 2020, the creation, utilization and protection of copyright have received unprecedented attention. During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, my country will make strides from a major intellectual property country and a major copyright country to a powerful country in intellectual property and copyright," said Yan Xiaohong, chairman of the China Copyright Association.
The industry is also taking action. As the head of the industry, China Reading Group has long insisted on combating piracy, established an independent team and continuously improved its technical monitoring mechanism, and comprehensively monitored 5 key channels including PC, APP, WeChat official account, online disk and audio, once a week The entire network is monitored, effectively locating pirated information and using judicial weapons. In June 2020, Reading published the "Genuine Alliance" announcement, launched substantive measures to combat piracy, and promised to carry out long-term and unremitting rights protection operations regardless of cost.
"The application of new technologies can effectively improve the efficiency of copyright protection. Regulatory authorities should actively adapt to the development of new technologies and accelerate the improvement of the rules for the application of new intellectual property technologies. Flexible use of new technologies such as blockchain to improve intellectual property protection and improve the quality of intellectual property review And efficiency. Blockchain technology has become a pioneer in innovative applications in the field of copyright protection due to its distributed, immutable, and time-sequential characteristics. Regulatory authorities can improve rules that are compatible with blockchain deposits, and promote judicial and law enforcement agencies. Use blockchain technology for related evidence collection and storage to solve the problem of online literature copyright protection." Cheng Wu said.
In terms of copyright protection, Gong Jianghui feels that ordinary readers should not stay out of the matter, and should establish a concept that "novels are also commodities". "Some people think that if you can see piracy, why spend money? After all, they still think that novels are not commodities and are not worth paying for novels. In fact, the cost of reading online is not high. The money to watch a movie is enough to read a million Literary works of Chinese characters can give readers dozens of hours of entertainment experience. Nowadays, Chinese consumers can accept tens of yuan a movie ticket, but cannot accept a few cents of 1,000-word novels. Such a concept requires slow Turn around slowly."