In the name of "fair use" for profit, how to deal with "moving of film and television"?
"Wonderful collections", "advanced spoilers", "movie commentary"... "short video to follow drama" has become a fashion.
Film and television editing numbers that use this as a selling point flood all major short video platforms, which has also triggered controversy over the legality of secondary creation.
Recently, 73 organizations, including industry associations, video platforms, and film and television companies, issued a joint statement calling on producers and operators of short video platforms and public accounts to respect originality, protect copyright, and not to edit or cut related film and television works without authorization. For infringements such as article, handling, dissemination, etc., when necessary, centralized legal rights protection actions will be initiated against such acts.
Relevant experts said that in the face of new forms of intellectual property infringement, it is not clear how to confirm and safeguard rights.
The interests of all parties are competing, and there is still a long way to go to purify the copyright ecology of the short video industry.
"Cut strips" and "handling" are popular
The 46th "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status" shows that as of December 2020, the number of short video users in my country has reached 873 million.
Countless content producers have plunged into this red sea, and editing film and television videos has become the first choice of many entrants due to its easy access to materials and convenient operation.
The reporter opened a short video app, and the top of the film and television district rankings was a commentary video on the hit drama "Awakening Times."
The blogger has won more than 6 million fans by virtue of his second creation of many popular film and television dramas, making him one of the top 100 authors of the site in 2020.
According to the "2020 China Online Short Video Copyright Monitoring Report" released by the 12426 Copyright Monitoring Center, from January 2019 to October 2020, during the monitoring of 4,894 film and television animation works, a total of 14.0682 million short video links were found to be suspected of infringement. Articles, the number of short video infringements of a single TV drama is as many as 5,991.
A reporter searched on a short video website and found that there were hundreds of accounts with the word "movie editing" in their usernames. Many accounts stated on the homepage that "original clips refused to be moved", and the platform gave them the label "creator in the field of movies and TV." ".
The reporter found that the content released by these accounts can be roughly divided into several categories. One is a collection of the essence of compressed plot production, the other is to spoil the content of video sites in advance, and the third is to quickly explain film and television dramas in a teasing manner.
Tan Yunming, director of the Department of Journalism of the Central University of Finance and Economics, analyzed that the "come here" style of short video chasing dramas caters to the current consumer trend, and some short videos are even more popular than the original.
However, editing out of context destroys the integrity and aesthetic experience of film and television dramas.
Zhao Zhanzhu, 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 the Copyright Law provides for 12 “fair use” situations, including appropriate citations for the purpose of introducing and commenting on a certain work. Numbers are often used for profit in the name of "fair use".
There are many channels for realizing traffic
Industry insiders pointed out that the operating threshold of film and television editing accounts is low, there are many monetization channels, and the group of practitioners is wide.
When fans accumulate to a certain scale, they can achieve profit through traffic sharing, advertising revenue, user rewards, and live streaming.
This has evolved into a mature industrial chain.
The reporter's investigation found that some of the head accounts of several major short video platforms also took up part-time jobs for teaching apprentices, and even directly marked "WeChat for learning to carry" on the homepage.
In a live broadcast of the lecture, faced with the trainees’ worries about infringement, a big V responded like this: “You still want to make money by following the rules?” Then, he listed several ways for the trainees to monetize their followers: selling hands. , Animation derivatives, video website members, movie tickets, film and television resources... and his own way is to attract traffic and sell courses. The reporter saw video courses ranging from 9.9 yuan to 99 yuan in his online shop. The content includes zero-based tutorials for film and television editing, short video rapid fan copywriting, and necessary skills for live broadcast.
Another blogger said in the live broadcast that avoiding violations and infringements is an important point of knowledge.
The reporter followed the prompt private message to the blogger to reply to "learning" and entered the "free learning group for film and television transportation" he established.
When the group members reached 500 people, the group owner began to share some technical methods that could “smart” evade censorship, and then he said that he could provide ready-made materials for only 499 yuan of tuition.
The more intuitive income comes from the cash rewards of the short video platform.
The “Creation Incentive Plan” of a certain platform stipulates that users’ likes are comprehensively calculated based on interactive behaviors such as likes, as the primary measurement target for revenue calculation.
In the specific implementation, the old users summarized the rule as "1000 broadcast subsidy 3 yuan".
The person in charge of the platform has revealed that the peak value of creators' single-day income exceeds 30,000 yuan.
Regarding this model, some netizens said: "Under the situation that anti-plagiarism supervision is not in place, using broadcast volume for subsidies will encourage infringement."
Multi-party efforts are needed to purify the copyright ecology
"Hot dramas are difficult to protect rights, and cold dramas have no motivation." A practitioner in the film and television industry told reporters that despite the proliferation of film and television transportation, many original creators did not choose to defend their rights. Obtaining evidence is time-consuming and laborious, the cost of protecting rights is too high, and the amount of compensation is low; for dramas that are not very popular, infringing short videos will bring traffic to help them'out of the circle'. Whether rights protection has become an embarrassing question ."
Zhao Zhanzhu believes that platform companies cannot shirk the blame in some infringement cases.
"While enjoying the traffic dividend, the platform must also assume the social responsibility of protecting copyright. First, an industry convention must be established, and traffic incentive mechanisms must not be abused to mislead users. Second, the monitoring system must be improved to improve the accuracy of infringement monitoring. Third, there must be post-mortems, after receiving reports from the right holders, and if the evidence is found, the infringing account will be permanently banned."
"At present, there are still ambiguities in the identification of infringing works, and relevant departments need to formulate detailed rules after evaluation to provide unblocked channels for rights holders to protect their rights." Zhao Zhanzhan said.
Tan Yunming believes that the introduction of third-party organizations can be considered to improve the copyright environment.
"For example, the China Audio Collection Association, as a third party to record companies and KTV operators, first obtains authorization from the record company, and then collects copyright licensing fees and issues licenses from KTV operators that join the association. The film and television industry can also learn from this model. , The introduction of the copyright collective management organization. After the consensus is formed, the bold use of the originality is assured, and both parties have no worries."
At the legal level, the newly revised "Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China" will come into effect on June 1, which stipulates that for serious infringements, punitive damages of more than 1 time and less than 5 times the illegal business amount can be imposed, and the legal The upper limit of compensation has been increased from 500,000 yuan to 5 million yuan.
The industry believes that the increase in illegal costs will effectively restrain the knowingly offenders.
In addition, relevant departments will organize a special action "Jianwang 2021" this year to strengthen key supervision of major online service providers in the fields of online video, music, literature, etc., strengthen copyright supervision of new formats such as webcast and self-media, and consolidate copyright The results of governance have promoted Internet companies to fully perform their main responsibilities.
Chen Xi