Managing IP magazine, had a link to an interesting China Daily article, see here in which a State Administration for Radio Film and Television (SARFT) official was quoted as saying that it is “working on the establishment of an internet audio-visual programs industry association (..)”. The application has been submitted and it now waiting approval to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Also interesting in the article is that the government intensified supervision over major internet enterprises, a precautionary move to stop piracy spreading. “In 2009, the number websites being supervised by local copyright authorities, reached 3,029. They include Taobao.com, Baidu, Sohu and Youku.”
That means that if infringement still took place in that period, it was under local copyright supervision.
Taobao is China’s e-commerce platform. And where eBay is sued by trademark holders in the U.S. (Tiffany), France (Hermès and LVHM) and Belgium (Lancôme), in China Taobao was sued for example by Puma; read Lee, Won Hee Elaine. ‘Online Auction Sites and Inconsistencies: A Case Study of France, China, and the United States.’ American University Intellectual Property Brief, Spring 2010, 50-57, here.
Jesse London (who is the managing editor of Cornell Journal of International Law), wrote an interesting note on China’s Approaches to Intellectual Property Infringement on the Internet for the Internet Journal of Rutgers School of Law, volume 38, 2010-2011, read here. Mr London is comparing the IFPI cases against Baidu and Yahoo China and comes to the conclusion that the degree of good faith of the online service provider is crucial, but so is the degree of reasonableness of the demands of the trademark holder by insisting in the measures against infringement.
Youku (the Chinese equivalent of YouTube) had a lot of pirated Hollywood movies. But I checked a few times and they indeed seem to have cleaned up a lot of copyright piracy.
