Archive for the ‘Intellectual Property Law’ Category

China Stiffens Penalties for Online Piracy

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

New regulations go into effect July 1 in China targeting distributors of unauthorized content online. The regulations, which carry a maximum administrative fine of approximately US$12,000, target search engines like Baidu, which are the backbone of online file sharing in China, as millions of users can search the various Chinese search engines for links to thousands of unauthorized copies of songs and movies.

Bloomberg.com quotes one analyst as saying that “Baidu will be under a lot of pressure to stop offering links to illegal MP3 files and may have to stop their MP3 search service.” Stop offering links to illegal MP3 files? I don’t see it. Providing links to unauthorized content is a cornerstone of Chinese search engine revenue–not just for Baidu, but for all the Chinese search engines. A $12,000 fine is not going to intimidate any search engine; they’ll just chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

But they’re painted into a corner, and effectively, copyright owners have forced their hand. These search engines want to go legit and play ball with copyright owners. But if Baidu were to give up its MP3 links, as the analyst quoted above suggests, they’d be committing suicide. The other Chinese search engines would gladly take Baidu’s share of the music search traffic, administrative fines and all. Copyright owners are not going to win a shoving match with search engines.

But, in the words of Obi Wan Kenobi, “You can’t win. But there are alternatives to fighting.” For example, search engines have offered to give copyright owners a portion of their ad revenue in return for licensing the content, but the major entertainment companies will have none of it. Some Chinese record companies–like Taihe Rye, a successful domestic Chinese label–recognize that online piracy is a fact of life and business, so Taihe has made special arrangements with Baidu to clamp down on pirate links for the first two weeks after a new release. This allows Taihe to capture the majority of its expected revenue from a release while not eviscerating Baidu’s revenue or market share. $12,000 fines won’t do it. Frankly, even bigger penalties are unlikely to have much effect. But copyright owners have alternatives.

Posted in China, Intellectual Property Law, Music, P2P, Piracy | 3 Comments »

Asia at the Cutting Edge?

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

Today (5/30/06), Berkman’s Digital Media in Asia Project co-founder Eric Priest will give an informal lunchtime talk on Asia’s role in shaping the future global entertainment industries. Info is as follows:

Berkman Tuesday Luncheon Series, Tuesday, May 30 – 12:30 pm
Berkman Conference Room, Berkman Center
1587 Mass. Ave., Harvard Law School, Cambridge MA

Guest: Eric Priest
Topic: Asia at the Cutting Edge?

Some believe Asia is at the cutting edge of twenty-first century entertainment industry business models. A combination of high copyright piracy levels and high-tech populations has led entertainment companies in places like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea to embrace the internet and emerging digital and mobile technologies as they seek innovative new revenue sources. This includes a massive new market for citizen-created media (music and movies) on the internet in China. What are the trends and are they really leading to sustainable business models for the rest of the world to emulate? Is the conservative state-run media in China creating a strong market for alternative, citizen-created Internet media and what are the implications for Chinese society, politics, and the entertainment industries? With all the emphasis on technology, is creativity increasingly an afterthought?

Eric Priest is a research fellow in the Berkman Center’s project on Internet Filtering, and a cofounder of Berkman’s Digital Media in Asia Project. He is also a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School, and an adjunct professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Bio: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/eric_priest
Digital Media in Asia project blog: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dmablog/

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Posted in China, Hong Kong, Intellectual Property Law, Internet, Mobile Music, Music, Piracy, South Korea, Taiwan | 3 Comments »

Shanghai International Forum on Digital Media and Intellectual Property

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

The IP First Society, a nonprofit organization based in Shanghai, will host the Shanghai International Forum on Digital Media and Intellectual Property. The forum is being held in connection with the Shanghai Intellectual Property Week, and is designed to “bring together global leading thinkers, venture capitalists, bankers, investors, professional advisors, regulators, and policy makers to explore the interplay of digital media and intellectual property from strategic, economic and regulatory perspectives.”

I’ll be appearing on a panel entitled, “Where is the Way-out: Lock & Key vs. Open Access,” discussing whether content owners are better off allowing more open access to their works or employing technological protection measures (DRMs).

The abstract for my talk:

“Competing with Free”

Digital technologies and the internet give consumers unprecedented control over how creative works can be enjoyed and shared. The increase in consumer control results in a corresponding decrease in traditional entertainment companies’ control over their content. In response to this shift, large entertainment companies employ a combination of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and copyright enforcement to extend established business models online. The strategy is unlikely to succeed, however, because strict copyright enforcement and restrictive technological protections are out of line with consumer expectations. Consumers want value and flexibility from their digital content, and piracy offers both while DRM-protected content offers neither. The best way for legitimate content to compete with free content online is to structure a DRM-free internet entertainment distribution model that provides consumers with a combination of flexibility, convenience, service, and features superior to what illicit file-sharing services can offer, at a price point low enough that the switch from pirated to legitimate content is painless.

Posted in China, Intellectual Property Law, Internet | Comments Closed

DMIA Speaker Series Presents Bill Hennessey on Chinese IP Law

Sunday, April 16th, 2006

Please join the Digital Media in Asia Project April 19th 4-6PM in the Berkman Center conference room for Professor Bill Hennessey’s talk “Are there ‘Special Characteristics’ in Chinese IP Law?”

Bill Hennessey, Professor of Law and Chair of the IP Faculty at Franklin Pierce and Co-Director of the Intellectual Property Summer Institute at Tsinghua University School of Law since 2002, will talk about his experiences with IP policy makers in China since the “opening up” of the PRC in 1979, and offer some speculations about where China’s IP law and policy will be a decade or two from now. The second edition of Prof. Hennessey’s casebook, Int’l IP Law & Policy (with Dinwoodie and Perlmutter) will be published this summer by LexisNexis. He holds a Ph.D. in Chinese Language and Literature from Michigan.

Refreshments will be served.

Posted in China, Intellectual Property Law | Comments Closed

Homemade videos in China highlight the internet as an alternative to state-run TV

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

Celebrated Chinese film director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) has threatened to sue Hu Ge, a 31 year-old Shanghai audio engineer, with copyright infringement–because of a homemade spoof about steamed buns.  Hu was so disappointed with Chen’s latest film, The Promise, that he put together The Steamed Bun Murder, a 20-minute parody of the film, and posted it on the internet. Hu’s parody has become an overnight sensation in China, and something of a cause c�l�bre.

From The Times:

[Hu’s] satire, unprecedented in China’s carefully monitored media, has
attracted millions of viewers, almost certainly many more than paid to
see The Promise. The film has proved to be something of a box-office flop, although distributors say it has earned �15 million.

Chinese collapse in gales of laughter as they watch Mr Hu’s spoof. The Steamed Bun Murder
not only parodies the most expensive film made in China, but also pokes
fun at state television. He uses a poker-faced presenter and stuffy
communist terminology in his tongue-in-cheek report of the
investigation into the humble bun murder.

If Chen pursues a legal case it is unclear if Chinese courts would allow a parody fair-use defense. Such parodies are rarely produced or broadcast by the strictly controlled state-run traditional media, so these might be untested legal waters.

There is a developing trend of homemade spoofs gaining phenomenal popularity over the internet in China (e.g., the Back Dorm Boys, whose goofy dormroom webcam video of themselves performing Backstreet Boys tracks was such a sensation it landed them an advertising deal with Motorola). Clearly, Chinese consumers see the internet as a source of alternative content that’s in tune with the modern Chinese urban experience in a way that the conservative state-run media is not. Hu’s spoof is a salient example, taking direct shots at a state-run media perceived as stuffy.

Posted in China, Film/DVD, Intellectual Property Law, Internet | Comments Closed

This Thursday March 2: The Digital Media in Asia Speaker Series Presents Chinese Cyberlaw Expert Peter Yu

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

This Thursday, March 2, we’re pleased to present a live and webcast event, co-hosted with the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School.  Professor Peter Yu will present “Elegant Offenses, Digital Opium and the Sinicyberspace.”  Lunchtime talks begin promptly at 12:30 p.m.  This talk is open to the public, and is located at Harvard Law School, Pound Hall 106. You are invited to bring your lunch beginning at 12 noon to meet the guest speaker and others in EALS and the Digital Media in Asia Project. We’ll supply fruit, cookies, and beverages.

We will post a link to the webcast on this blog shortly before the event.

From Professor Yu:

China is notorious for its lack of protection of intellectual property rights.  Every year, the United States is estimated to have lost billions of dollars due to piracy and counterfeiting in the country alone.  As contents become increasingly digitized in the information age, the protection of intellectual property rights in the digital area has presented a major challenge for foreign copyright holders.  Today, China has more than 100 million Internet users and the second largest Internet population in the world, behind only the United States.  If these users became pirates and distributed copyrighted works illegally to other parts of the world, online piracy would become a major transnational problem.  This presentation will discuss the challenges concerning the protection of intellectual property rights in digital media in China. It will also explore the impact of the country’s Internet regulation and information control policy, as well as its recent accession to the World Trade Organization.

About Peter Yu:

Peter K. Yu (余家明) is Associate Professor of Law and the founding director of the nationally-ranked Intellectual Property & Communications Law Program at Michigan State University College of Law.  He holds appointments in the Asian Studies Center and the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University. He is also a research fellow of the Center for Studies of Intellectual Property Rights at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China and a member of the affiliated faculty of the Working Group on Property, Citizenship, and Social Entrepreneurism at Syracuse University College of Law.  Born and raised in Hong Kong, Professor Yu is a leading expert in international intellectual property and communications law.  He is the editor or coeditor of three books and currently is working on a book titled Paranoid Pirates and Schizophrenic Swashbucklers: Protecting Intellectual Property in Post-WTO China.  Professor Yu has spoken at events organized by the ITU, UNCTAD, WIPO and the U.S. government and at leading research institutions from around the world.  He is a frequent commentator in the national and international media, and his publications are available on his website at www.peteryu.com.

Posted in China, Intellectual Property Law, Internet | 2 Comments »

World Economic Forum: “Letting Go of Intellectual Property Rights”

Monday, January 30th, 2006

The rise of digital technologies and the Internet has made the current copyright regime antiquated, at best, and irrelevant at worst. For various reasons, the patent and copyright laws seem increasingly unworkable given business and social realities of today. What would (or will?) the world be like without copyright and patent rights?

That was the question posed to CEOs at a workshop of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. According to the Financial Times article covering the session, some among the breakout groups that tackled the question saw real advantages to industry and consumers in increased efficiency and increased “personalization of products” (not quite sure what that means). Regarding media in the digital age,

Companies could also aim to make money from context rather than content. A film company, for example, could generate income by providing a stimulating cinema experience rather than selling the film itself. But the film industry might also have to face some unpleasant truths.

“Since the time of the pharaohs the pyramids have not been built. We should expect the death of Titanic the movie. The idea of spending a quarter of a billion dollars on a film about a sinking ship” is no longer going to work, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance at Harvard and Oxford universities.

One has to wonder how many of these CEOs found it an interesting exercise for an hour, but consider it little more than that. Will they be so open to some of the ideas floated during the session when the realization hits, perhaps sooner than later, that copyright and patent laws in their present forms really are out of step with technological and social realities?

Posted in Intellectual Property Law | Comments Closed

RussiaProfile.org: “Is Enforcing Copyright Necessary for Russia?”

Friday, November 25th, 2005

In a sophisticated look at the complex interplay between law, piracy, and the Internet in developing countries like Russia and China, Russia Priofile.org asks what is the role of copyright law in Russia’s future.

One can see numerous similarities between Russia and China (as well as many other Asian countries) with regard to the causes and complexities surrounding the piracy phenomenon. Like China, Russia has up-to-date laws in place, but there is a huge disparity between the laws on the books and the realities on the ground. The scale of the problem and domestic political complexities mean that any amount of browbeating by the US will yield little in the way of effective piracy enforcement. These countries need innovative solutions that compensate creators (thereby incentivizing and enabling creation) and simultaneously ensure that the public is able to enjoy widespread access to the creations.

Alexander Sergeyev, a commentator on science and technology for Radio Liberty, is one of the most vocal anti-copyright advocates in Russia. The starting point for his assessment is the sheer volume of copyright infringement in Russia, which cannot be simply reversed by decrees from above; instead, the international legal doctrine needs to be revised and coordinated better with the rise of challenging new technologies. He also argues that widespread piracy is what inadvertently spawned a home-grown computer and software industry throughout the 1990s.

Sergeyev likens the internet to samizdat, or self-publishing, which thrived in the Soviet Union. It is a decentralized system which treats outside regulatory mechanisms as near-totalitarian infringement on intellectual freedom and creativity. “The copyright lobby is mostly concerned with the bottom line for corporations which have a huge stake in the system,” Sergeyev said. “The government needs to introduce better financing mechanisms to make creative pursuits commercially viable and compensate for the shortcomings of market mechanisms. The idea is to stimulate private initiative while serving the public interest and fostering cultural diversity.”

One interesting statistic from the article: in Moscow’s 812 outlets where pirated software is sold, profits have been cut in half in 2005 due to file sharing and other online transactions involving pirated goods. This is not surprising, and provides more statistical support for what logic and experience suggests: online file sharing decreases the market for physical piracy. Clearly, the future of the “piracy” phenomenon–for better or worse–is online. Such statistics provide support for the contention that instituting a governmentally administered alternative compensation system in countries like China or Russia–and thus facilitating even more file sharing online–would very likely lead to a significant reduction in the manufacture and sales of physical pirate goods, decreasing piracy overall. An alternative compensation system would be one type of innovative solution for these countries, along the lines I discussed above.

Posted in Intellectual Property Law, Piracy | Comments Closed

Intellectual Property Watch Weblog: Japan proposes new anti-piracy/counterfeiting treaty

Tuesday, November 15th, 2005

Japan has proposed a Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Counterfeits and Pirated Goods, which would focus on the import, export and transshipment of illegal goods. One significant way the new treaty would differ from TRIPS (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property, regulated by the WTO) is that Japan’s proposed treaty would focus on stopping exports of infringing goods, while TRIPS primarily addresses the importation of infringing goods. The treaty is meant to supplement, rather than supplant, TRIPS. The treaty would also “aim to deter counterfeits and pirated goods on the Internet.” According to the posting, it is unclear which international body would regulate the proposed treaty, but Japan is hoping it would be regulated by an international law enforcement organization such as Interpol or the World Customs Organization.

The article notes that the US (which, incidentally, originally sought an anti-counterfeiting treaty as early as the 1970s) is cool to Japan’s proposal. It quotes a US official as saying, ‘”We applaud the energy that Japan brings to this issue’…. However, the United States is more focused on implementation of anti-counterfeiting measures ‘right now,’ targeting ‘action and results.'”

Posted in Intellectual Property Law, Japan, Piracy | Comments Closed