There is no standard pricing, the content is uneven, and piracy and infringement occur frequently. The
knowledge payment market needs to crack the regulatory problems
(News reporter Yu Lingge) The outbreak of the new coronary pneumonia epidemic has brought opportunities for the development of online knowledge payment. While the knowledge payment market is developing rapidly, there are also problems such as no standard pricing, uneven content, and frequent infringement of piracy.
During the Spring Festival this year, Beijing white-collar Jia Nan, under the recommendation of a WeChat public account, spent 99 yuan at a "concessionary price" to purchase an online micro-course to explain financial management knowledge. She found that the content of the course is very "water": "The lecturer has no excellent qualifications but is packaged as an elite, and the content is basically taken from entry-level financial books." The online community of micro-classes also constantly recommends higher fees. The first-order course made Jia Nan feel "stubborn".
At present, knowledge payment mainly includes rewards, paid members, paid communities, paid personalized consultation and other payment methods. The pricing of various products ranges from tens of yuan to hundreds of yuan, but there is no standard pricing standard in the industry. .
Fan Mingzhi, deputy director of the China Institute of Applied Law, believes that these different types of knowledge payment are the acts of providing information services, and the "fatal weakness" of this transaction method is the asymmetric information between the two parties. "Knowledge information is difficult to evaluate, and it is impossible to formulate specific standards for the content of the information and whether it is equal to the rights and obligations of payment."
Issues such as homogenization of content, water injection of content, and unevenness of the content have become prominent, leading users to find that they are buying "inferior goods" after paying for purchases and feel "punished."
The reporter saw on a public account of an online course that there are many hot-selling courses that claim to "make money at home as a sideline business" and "traffic dividend monetization skills". Most of the lecturers are packaged as "big V" and industry stars, and it is difficult to check their true qualifications. In addition, the lack of supervision of content producers by the platform will also affect the health of the content. Earlier, a knowledge-based community app was removed from order for connivance of group owners to share pornographic content in paid groups.
The issue of piracy and infringement in the field of knowledge payment is also controversial. Public reports show that on the e-commerce platform and the QQ group, many stores copy knowledge-paying products and audios, and package them at low prices for secondary sales, and even form a gray industrial chain.
In this regard, Zhao Zuozhan, a special researcher at the Intellectual Property Research Center of China University of Political Science and Law, said that if there is no copyright or no copyright authorization, selling or disseminating through payment constitutes copyright infringement. Fan Mingzhi pointed out that whether the knowledge payer has the right to use and dispose of the obtained information arbitrarily involves copyright, trade secrets, reputation rights, privacy rights and other issues. But on the current knowledge-paying platform, there are no relevant rules.
In response to the problems exposed by the knowledge payment market, legal professionals suggest that consumers should keep their eyes open, rational consumption, and scientific consumption; rights holders should enhance copyright protection awareness and take measures such as complaints, reports, and lawsuits to protect their legal rights; knowledge payment The platform should also improve the copyright protection mechanism, and adopt technical and manual methods to deal with the bad content on the platform in a timely manner; the regulator should strengthen the supervision after the event and provide good services to the consumers.
Yu Lingge
Yu Lingge