R2G: Seeking Protection for Online Music in China
What are Chinese companies doing to protect their intellectual property online?
To supplement governmental enforcement efforts, private companies, like R2G, have formed to help protect their clients’ intellectual property. According to Jun Wu, CEO and founder of R2G, via an e-mail interview, their strategy is to “track each individual BT or P2P site down to make sure that they do not distribute [their clients’ copyrighted] content.” R2G will try to persuade these service providers to adopt a business model that compensates the copyright holders or else face lawsuits. The reason websites offer links to free media, Wu says, is mainly to attract traffic. Therefore, the hardest sites to convert are the medium sized ones because they are “always afraid that they will loose traffic during the process of turning legit, therefore loosing the possibility of ever competing against the big ones.”
Wu’s philosophy is that as R2G converts rogue websites to legitimate distributors: “It will be increasingly difficult for an average consumer to be able to find illegal venues to download pirated content,” and thus, users will switch over to legal sources. Of course, R2G is hoping that they can convert existing websites faster than new ones appear. R2G plans to focus on tracking public sites first, leaving potent niches like university networks and private FTP servers unexamined for the moment.
R2G has generally received favorable court opinions when suing websites for copyright infringement. They successfully forced China’s most popular MP3 search engine, Baidu.com, to remove thousands of links after filing an infringement lawsuit against the website. Shortly following the Baidu case, R2G sued similar websites, the9.com and 21cn.com, both of whom soon removed their links to pirated content.
Ian Lamont
December 14, 2005 @ 2:53 pm
Very interesting, especially the information about the successful court cases. I wonder if the legal successes are the result of laws that have real teeth, or where the cases were brought to trial (i.e., national, provincial, or local courts)?
Also, this begs the question: how is it possible to get a Chinese Internet company to remove pirated content relatively quickly, but impossible to convince or force a Chinese store or manufacturer to remove or stop making pirated CDs and DVDs, despite many years of complaints, laws, regulations, and court cases?
Eric Priest
December 14, 2005 @ 3:10 pm
I think a large part of the answer to both of your questions resides in the fact that companies like Baidu and The9.com are publicly traded. They have business models that extend well beyond providing links to unauthorized music, and are not very concerned about losing the hits they get from people looking for music. They are much more concerned about the way threatened copyright infringement lawsuits look on their securities filings and the way threats of litigation impact their reputation among investors.