Digital Media in Asia Blog

An interesting news article about China’s digital media situation.

Some interesting snippets from the article:

“I would like to plant this challenge: by 2008, to have more
legal than illegal DVDs sold in China, to have more American
movies in Chinese theaters and to have more Chinese movies in
American theaters,” says Dan Glickman, CEO of the MPAA.

“It is virtually impossible to find counterfeit Olympics
goods in China. Why? As one of the Chinese officials said, it
is because fakes dilute the value of the logo, the intellectual
property upon which the Chinese have invested to finance the
games,” he continues.

A decrease in piracy from 90% to 50% is a four fold change. This may be difficult to achieve considering the evolving technologies that make filesharing easier, and pervasive broadband access that makes it faster.

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.

The South Korean government has announced plans to pour US$90 million into the failing Korean music industry, which it claims is slumping due to the “rapid growth of digital music market and emergence of diverse high-tech music-listening devices.”

As part of the initiative, the government will expand its definition of the “music industry” to include not only record labels and live musical performances, but also “virtually every area regarding music, such as music education, production of musical instruments, performances by underground music bands, music management, online and offline circulation of music and ‘noraebang,’ rooms hired for karaoke singing.”