What is the solution to the problem of piracy in the continuation of online articles? The pirated website has been updated to 1369 chapters, and the novel has written 245 chapters. Pirated | Novel | Website

Recently, the online author "Jiangshan Tibi" discovered that his articles written on legitimate novel websites were not only stolen by the pirated website "Biquting", but also updated to 1369 chapters on the pirated website, which originally only updated 245 chapters. This matter has sparked heated discussions online.

On the afternoon of July 18th, the reporter contacted Sun Shanshan, whose pen name is "Jiangshan Tibi". He is a "post-2000" online writer from Xuzhou, Jiangsu. "There are so many pirated websites now that I can't finish watching them. The website I discovered alone has over 1000 clicks." He called for respect for originality, respect for legitimate content, and protection of the rights and interests of writers.

Is "continuation" of pirated websites considered literary creation?

Sun Shanshan is a contracted writer for Qidian Chinese Network, with 7 years of writing experience. He likes to write a novel under a different pen name, and "Jiangshan Tibi" is one of the "vests". A few days ago, he accidentally stumbled upon a "tweet" of his novel on a short video, recommending it in the form of "anime+copywriting". "The tweet had a lot of traffic, so I wanted to search for any stolen content, and sure enough, it was stolen."

On Qidian Chinese website, the book "Strange Doomsday" has only updated over 240 chapters

He found that on a pirated website called "Biquting", his novel "Strange Doomsday: Starting with Printing Billions of Dark Money" was being updated with the title "Invincible Father". The author and copy were the same as before, and even more outrageously, this novel, which was updated to 245 chapters on the legitimate website, had already been updated to 1369 chapters on the pirated website, faster than the original author's creative speed.

On short video platforms, the tweet traffic of "Invincible Father" is very high

The novel displayed on pirated websites has been updated to 1369 chapters

Sun Shanshan, who has written more than 10 novels, still considers himself the most ordinary creator. The low threshold for online literature creation attracts creators with literary dreams to engage in writing. However, this is also a pyramid shaped industry, where "a few 'great gods' have achieved both fame and fortune, and 99% are still ordinary creators." Sun Shanshan said that he is one of the 99% ordinary online writers. "I am quite clumsy. As an ordinary author like me, there is a word in the industry called 'street fighting', but I like this industry."

Online articles carry Sun Shanshan's dreams. He started writing online articles from high school, initially in a notebook, densely packed, and later spread to novel websites. He had signed contracts seven times but failed. "At the most confused time, he wrote over 300000 words in a month without any income," he said.

Nowadays, he has a regular job with five insurances and one fund, and still insists on writing novels every day, often staying up late to create. Pirated websites are equivalent to stealing the fruits of your labor, taking advantage of readers, authors, and legitimate platforms. The existence of pirated articles is a great blow to original writers who rely on royalties.

Strange Doomsday is almost Sun Shanshan's best performing book, with 140000 followers on Qidian Chinese website and 40000 to 50000 followers on QQ Reading. "But compared to the traffic of tweets, my earnings are very small, with less than 100 orders per chapter." He said that the tweet of "Invincible Father" had 5.8 million views on a certain video platform; On another video platform, the tweets of "The Way of the Ghost King" received over 2.8 million views. In fact, the copy of both books came from his novel "The Strange End". "This book has not only become popular on one platform, but most of the revenue has been taken by pirated websites."

Pirated websites have transformed the novel into "Invincible Father"

At the same time, whether "continuation" on pirated websites should be regarded as literary creation has also sparked heated discussions. Previously, there were cases of "continuation" on the internet, where some authors abandoned the novel midway through, while writers on pirated websites continued to write the novel, which was both hilarious and heartbreaking. A reasonable continuation is naturally literary creation. For example, in the field of traditional literature, writer Liu Xinwu is famous for his continuation of Dream of the Red Chamber. But from a common sense, it is unlikely that Sun Shanshan's "Strange End" will be artificially continued, and pirated websites will find it difficult to create a new thousand chapters of content in just a few days. After Sun Shanshan discovered the situation of piracy, he gave feedback to the editor of a legitimate website, "This is the first time I have encountered this situation. Most people guess it is an AI continuation, or a chapter that is split into eight chapters."

A senior online reader told reporters that there are various ways of piracy on pirated websites, and there are not many who actually continue to write about it. If there are any, they are just individual cases. "The most common way is to simply copy the original novel. As soon as the original novel is updated, the pirated website will be updated. Another way of piracy is to change the title of the original novel, or to keep the title, author, and copy unchanged, but the content is pieced together. Take B's novel and paste it under A's short story title."

What is the solution to the dilemma of online literature piracy?

After Sun Shanshan's novel was infringed, the reading side responded that they will further investigate and initiate a rights protection action. On the afternoon of July 18th, the reporter searched on search engines and found that no relevant pirated novels could be found.

Piracy has always been a persistent problem in the online literature industry. Online writer Ren Xiaolong once told reporters that the loss from piracy is about three times the author's legitimate income, that is, if a novel has 30000 legitimate readers, perhaps 100000 readers will read it on pirated websites.

The reporter learned that there are two types of piracy methods for online articles: manual typing and automated bulk theft. The former highly relies on manual labor and presents a trend of scattered and frequent occurrences; The latter utilizes methods such as crawlers and OCR image recognition to replicate text content in bulk and quickly, bringing enormous pressure to content protection. "Pirates have formed a complete black industry chain of 'piracy distribution advertising' from purchasing open-source software to build websites/apps, importing content, renting servers to purchasing IP domain names, promoting search engines and application markets to accessing advertisements for profit. With the help of new technologies, the piracy industry chain has shown a trend of concealment and maturity, and the characteristics of low threshold and low cost have become more and more obvious." Yuewen Group stated that due to the massive number of piracy platforms, the infringing parties cannot be identified or confirmed as shell companies, overseas companies, etc., which pose great difficulties in identifying the infringing parties.

Regarding the infringement case of "Strange Doomsday", Zeng Mingquan, a partner lawyer at Fujian Geyi Law Firm, believes that for the content of the first 200 chapters, pirated websites have infringed on the right to reproduction, distribution, and information network dissemination. "The additional online articles added later have some controversy. If the character images and names of the original works are used, it may infringe on the right to adapt the works. If the characters and names of the original works are used in the later chapters, and if paid subscriptions are made for profit, they may be regulated by the Anti Unfair Competition Law."

Due to the low cost of infringement and high cost of rights protection, most authors lack the energy, time, and economic costs to protect their rights in the face of online literature piracy. An online writer said, "What the author can do is to call for genuine content or manually prevent theft. For new chapters, upload content unrelated to the plot first, and then update it to the correct chapter content after being captured by piracy merchants. Alternatively, provide clues about piracy and entrust the platform to protect its rights."

"Most authors don't have the energy or money to protect their rights, unless you are a well-known author and have a high level of attention. I hope to draw attention to us ordinary creators through this matter." Sun Shanshan said that he usually doesn't take "anti-theft" measures. "If you discover that a single article is a waste, it can easily harm legitimate readers."

Now, Sun Shanshan is "refining" his own novel. "After the piracy incident, the attention of this novel has increased. Some readers have pointed out some shortcomings. I started from scratch and revised it from more than 30 chapters to 110 chapters. I want to write a better story."

At present, many legitimate novel platforms have their own anti piracy methods. For example, Yuewen Group has independently developed an anti piracy system that can "delay" the time when novels are stolen. The maximum protection time for a single chapter of a work has been increased from 48 hours to 7 days, which to some extent protects the interests of writers, but still cannot eliminate the existence of piracy.

"From a data perspective, in 2022, Yuewen intercepted a total of 150 million pirated access attacks, which is equivalent to intercepting 410000 attacks on pirated websites like 'Biquge' every day. At its peak, Yuewen received 8000 access attacks from the same IP in just one minute, and had to deal with 25 pirate gangs in a day." Hou Xiaonan, CEO of Yuewen Group and Vice President of Tencent's Platform and Content Business Group, described it.

The issue of piracy remains a challenge for the online literature industry.