The industry has been suffering from "scissor hands" for a long time. Where is the difficulty of short video copyright protection?
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Recently, Audi's "Little Man of Life" advertisement was accused of plagiarism, once again setting off a wave of discussion on the copyright of short video works.
Short video copyright infringement problems occur frequently, and the industry has suffered from infringement problems for a long time.
The act of plagiarizing an idea or the core of a story makes it more difficult to determine whether it is infringing.
Experts recommend blocking and sparse combination.
It was first spread on social networks, and then was informed of infringement by the self-media blogger "Peking University Mange" online. On May 21, the solar term of Xiaoman, Audi's advertisement with the concept of "Little Man in Life" has experienced a lot of reputation. The reversal of the alleged plagiarism has set off another wave of discussions on short video copyright.
On the 25th, "Brother Manchu of Peking University" responded again, saying that the three parties have reached an agreement to authorize the copywriting of Xiaoman's works for free, and hope that the public will pay more attention to content and originality.
In recent years, the user and market scale of the short video industry have continued to grow, and the application scenarios have continued to expand, and related infringement issues have also occurred frequently.
Various "scissors" and "porters" appropriate the intellectual achievements of the copyright owner for themselves.
Short videos have become a "hardest hit" for copyright infringement.
The number of copyright cases involving short videos is increasing year by year
June 1 this year marks the one-year anniversary of the latest revision of the Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China.
The new law clarifies that as long as audiovisual works meet the characteristics of statutory works such as "original" and "expressible", they can obtain copyright protection.
In the comparison video released by "Peking University Mange", the copywriting of Audi's "Little Man of Life" advertisement and the video copy he has previously released are surprisingly high.
The ad used his expression almost "literally" without permission.
In this regard, Zhao Zhanzhan, a lawyer at Beijing Yunjia Law Firm and a special researcher at the Intellectual Property Research Center of China University of Political Science and Law, said that as the right holder, "Mengge Peking University" enjoys copyright in accordance with the law. Audi has used his works without authorization before, which constitutes a Copyright infringement.
Data show that as of December 2021, the number of short video users in my country was 934 million, accounting for 90.5% of the total netizens.
In addition to watching short videos, many people also use mobile phones to shoot short videos to share fragments of life.
At the same time, some short video works are integrated with e-commerce and advertising marketing to help the development of the digital economy.
"In the beginning, I wanted to use video to record my life. Later, it was moved to other platforms by others, and I liked and played a lot at once. Some bloggers even moved a dozen of my videos." The delivery boy Li Yuanyuan recorded taking his daughter The daily delivery of food was carried over by other accounts, and even made up stories. During the process of clarification, Li Yuanyuan's account gradually attracted attention.
Yang, who is also a video blogger, is an armless person with disabilities. After discovering that blogger Tan had modified and released his short video without permission and used it for commercial purposes, he sued the court.
The court held that although the video claimed by Yang was a video with goods, the script design, scene selection, mirror movement and editing were carried out around the relevant themes, which reflected the personalized expression of the video producer, and belonged to the work and should be protected by copyright.
According to the Beijing Internet Court, from September 9, 2018 to February 28, 2022, the court has accepted a total of 2,812 cases involving short video copyright disputes, and the number of cases has increased year by year. Among them, the number of short video copyright cases in 2021 will reach 2020. nearly twice the year.
Difficulties in Identifying and Governing Short Video Copyright Infringement
The analysis of the copyright cases involving short videos shows that the reproduction infringement of cutting and moving works is still the main type of infringement.
At the same time, infringing acts such as editing long video images with text content for secondary creation, and imitating the subject, content and method of other people's short video shooting to create similar short videos have gradually increased.
Plagiarizing the idea or the core of the story makes it more difficult to determine whether it is infringing.
Shi Wenxia, deputy secretary-general of the China Film Copyright Association, said in an interview with a reporter from Workers' Daily that one of the important principles of my country's copyright law is "ideological expression dichotomy."
"That is to protect the content of the work, but not the creativity of the work. From the idea to the work, it is a process of continuous enrichment, borrowing ideas or plagiarizing them is like drawing a line in the process, the left side of the line is the idea, the line The right side involves expression, so where the line is drawn needs to be judged in conjunction with the specific work.”
In the self-media environment, why does the industry suffer from copyright infringement for a long time?
Wei Pengju, Dean of the Institute of Cultural Economics, Central University of Finance and Economics analyzed that, first of all, although people's copyright awareness has generally improved in recent years, there are still some self-media creators who are not aware of copyright protection and have an indifferent attitude towards copyright protection; second, different from this time In the "Audi advertising copy plagiarism" incident, the direct and timely consequences of most infringements are not obvious, which strengthens the speculative psychology of the infringers; in addition, in the field of digital copyright protection, the rules for defining whether an act is an infringement needs to be improved.
Wei Pengju also mentioned that some original authors will deliberately choose to ignore infringement in order to achieve the dissemination effect of their works.
Shi Wenxia analyzed the difficulties of infringement governance from both personal and platform perspectives.
From a personal point of view, in the self-media era, video dissemination has a wide range and speed, the subject of short video infringement is too scattered and hidden, the monitoring and rights protection costs of a single work are high, and the benefits obtained from litigation rights protection are not equal to the cost of video production and commercial value. , rights holders do not have enough motivation to defend their rights.
For the platform, how to determine the balance between its main responsibility, social responsibility and the cost of active supervision is the difficulty of supervision.
Combining block and sparse to establish copyright protection mechanism
"Every platform is now encouraging users to create original works. The more original works, the greater the value of the platform. Copyright protection is to encourage creation." Wei Pengju said.
Shi Wenxia believes that creators may be both users of other people's works and rights holders of their own works. They should improve their copyright awareness, master certain copyright knowledge, or solve copyright-related matters through professional copyright agencies.
Platforms that provide information storage space and release channels for short video users should also regulate their own behavior and fulfill their regulatory review obligations.
"If the work uploaded by the user on the platform is infringing, then the judgment on whether the platform constitutes infringement usually applies the safe harbor rule. However, if the platform modifies, edits, recommends, or sticks to the top of the infringing video, it has a higher duty of care. Failure to perform obligations constitutes knowing or should know, and needs to bear joint and several liability." Zhao Zhanzhan suggested that short video platforms should play a more active role, strengthen supervision, and improve the efficiency of handling infringement complaints.
Regarding how to establish an effective copyright protection mechanism, Wei Pengju believes that the protection at the legal level is the most basic. In order to add considerable impetus to copyright protection, it is necessary to further recognize the market value of copyright, and rely on the establishment and improvement of capable market players. Form a community of interests with copyright owners to explore business models for copyright utilization and protection.
"On the one hand, we must block and control infringements; on the other hand, we must sparse and achieve reasonable authorization."
Shi Lan Na Su Mo