Writers are deeply violated and appear on pirated websites? Online literature piracy is rampant, with article updates only a few seconds away. Website | Piracy | Online literature
The new chapter will appear on pirated websites within a few minutes or even seconds after it is issued. There are only four people in the App "creation team" that publishes thousands of online novels. The browsing scale of pirated websites is several times that of genuine websites......
Recently, a reporter from the Rule of Law Daily learned from the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau that in several cases of online literature infringement, criminal suspects unscrupulously stole genuine e-books through self-written "crawler" software without the permission of the copyright owner., And published on the self-built App. The legitimate rights and interests of copyright owners have been seriously infringed, and readers are often harassed by all kinds of information related to pornography and gambling, which seriously endangers their physical and mental health.
To this end, the reporter launched an investigation into the chaos of online literature piracy, deeply understood the new characteristics of related crimes, and interviewed relevant experts on how to build a new ecology of online literature copyright protection.
Pirated Novels Repeatedly Prohibited
Online writers are deeply victimized.
Piracy has been around since ancient times. Every time Li Yu, a gifted scholar of the Ming Dynasty, finished writing a novel, within a few days, pirated books appeared thousands of miles away. When he went south to Guangdong, the engraving in his home was stolen, and the word "piracy" came from this. Yuan Mei, a gifted scholar in the Qing Dynasty, even wrote a poem denouncing him, "Zuo Si regretted making Sandu Fu, but he was a cheap paper seller".
Today, with the prosperity of online literature, text piracy has become a chronic disease that accompanies the industry. According to the report on copyright Protection and Development of China's online Literature in 2021 released by the China copyright Association, more than 80 per cent of works on most online literature platforms are pirated every year, and 82.6 per cent of online writers are deeply infringed by piracy. more than 40% of them frequently experience piracy.
Some online writers said that their novels on the signing platform had only been updated to more than 200 chapters, and the novels of the same name on the pirated platform had been "magic changed" to 1200 chapters. There are also online writers who have complained about piracy and have been threatened by the other party. Genuine platforms, on the other hand, suffer from the pain of automated mass piracy. Take Yuewen Group, which has several online literature platforms, as an example. At its most violent time, it can be attacked by 8000 visits from the same IP in one minute, and it has to fight 25 piracy gangs a day.
The reporter's investigation learned that the current chaos of online literature piracy is mainly manifested in the "three aspects and three difficulties".
The so-called "three", that is, network piracy to high-tech, hidden, industrial development. The distributed storage and distributed computing technology used by the genuine reading platform can improve the data processing capacity, but it also provides an opportunity for pirates to establish sites and drainage. In addition, pirates also steal content in batches through mobile transcoding, deep linking, website aggregation and text extraction technologies. However, pirated content is spread through various Internet channels, and its concealment is continuously enhanced. Accompanied by this is the trend of industrialization. Piracy platforms, promotion channels and advertising alliances form a community of interests, and each other shares gray income according to a certain proportion.
The so-called "three difficulties", that is, the anti-theft difficult, difficult to obtain evidence, difficult to protect rights. First of all, due to its characteristics of small space occupation and easy dissemination, text content can be copied in batches and quickly by pirates through "crawler", OCR map reading and other means. Even if a technical firewall is set up, it can still be uploaded again by typing text by hand. Secondly, many pirated online articles are transmitted covertly through channels such as online disks, microblogs, post bars/forums, public numbers, question-and-answer websites, etc, it is often impossible to determine the subject of the infringement or to confirm the subject and find it to be a shell company, an overseas company, etc., which makes it difficult to lock the infringing party and bring difficulties to the litigation and evidence collection; finally, even if the evidence is successfully obtained, it is still necessary to face a long litigation process, and the amount of compensation is often not enough to make up for the loss of the right holder.
New type of tort crime
Easy to fall into the plight of rights
"male god novel", "goddess novel", popularity list ...... this is a violation of the network novel copyright case involving reading app column. The reporter noticed at the scene of the case conference that the pirated App page was well-made and almost the same as the original.
After receiving the report of the infringement on the online literature platform, the Minhang Branch of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau quickly set up a task force to investigate. Focusing on the information flow of the software involved and the capital flow of the company involved, a criminal infringement gang headed by Du was completely depicted.
On March 1 this year, under the unified command and deployment of the Ministry of Public Security, the Shanghai police carried out simultaneous network collection operations in many places across the country, destroying the copyright infringement crime industry chain involving multiple links such as company registration, operation and promotion, and arrested 30 suspects. The amount involved is as high as 0.28 billion yuan.
Jiading Public Security Bureau also received a report. After investigation, it was found that there were thousands of unauthorized online novels on a certain reading App, which has attracted nearly 300000 users. On June 28, under the guidance of the Economic Investigation Team of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, Jiading police arrested 4 suspects who operated the illegal App.
A police officer handling the case said: "The difficulty of investigating such cases is not limited to the landing verification of criminal gangs, but also lies in the cracking of the means of committing the crime and the identification of infringements. In addition to traditional investigation, we have to rely on science and technology empowerment to complete the identification of the identity of infringing works and genuine works, and then break through the use of new technologies and new means of infringement crimes."
Professor Chen Shaoling, an expert in intellectual property law at East China University of political Science and Law, told reporters that according to Article 217 of the Criminal Law, for the purpose of profit, disseminating her works to the public through the information network without the permission of the copyright owner, if the amount of illegal income is large or there are other serious circumstances, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than ten years and a fine.
Chen Shaoling said that according to relevant judicial interpretations, "the amount of illegal business is more than 50,000 yuan, the total number of dissemination of other people's works is more than 500, the actual number of hits on the dissemination of other people's works reaches more than 50,000 times, the membership system is used to disseminate other people's works, and the number of registered members reaches more than 1,000" and other situations are "serious circumstances".
For online writers, when creating a work with a certain reputation, they often face the dilemma of being plagiarized or "magic changed. In response, Chen Shaoling suggested that the platform has the responsibility and obligation to assist in the relief of the contracted author, and the platform that obtains the author's copyright can directly protect its rights as the copyright owner. However, non-contracted authors can only file a copyright infringement lawsuit with the court through their own rights protection, but they can request the platform to help collect evidence on the way to protect their rights.
Establish and improve the complaint mechanism
Timely stop violations
According to the 2022 Research Report on the Development of China's Online Literature released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the market size of online literature will reach 38.93 billion billion yuan in 2022, a rapid growth of 8.8 percent over the same period last year. The full copyright operation of online literature IP affects the market size of digital cultural industries such as publishing, games, film and television, animation, music and audio, which is about 252 billion yuan.
In the face of such a huge market share, how to make copyright fully and comprehensively protected has become the key to the healthy and orderly development of the network literature industry.
In 2022, the National Copyright Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the National Internet Information Office jointly launched a special action to combat online infringement and piracy "Sword Net 2022". Among the ten major cases announced not long ago, two involved online text. Infringement has played a huge demonstration effect.
With the judicial influence of major cases, there are new countermeasures for problems such as long litigation cycles. In 2022, Yuewen Group took the lead in applying to the court for pre-litigation behavior preservation in the field of online literature copyright protection, breaking through the long litigation cycle through the "pre-litigation injunction" to stop the infringement in time and limit the adverse effects to a minimum.
The field of online literature is also continuously strengthening industry self-discipline. 20 provincial-level online writers, 522 online literature writers, and 12 platforms have voiced their initiatives, calling for a boycott of online writers who plagiarize and websites that publish pirated resources.
At the same time, major online literature platforms have upgraded their technical systems to increase investment in safeguarding rights, established and improved relevant complaints and review mechanisms, accepted authors' requests for safeguarding rights in a timely manner, and discovered and removed pirated works in a timely manner.
"the particularity of copyright protection determines the difficulty of its radical cure. It is not only necessary for political and legal organs to severely crack down on the infringement of lawbreakers and for the industry to speed up the establishment of a credit system, but also need to strengthen legal publicity and enhance the awareness of safeguarding the rights of online writers. cultivate the copyright awareness of the broad masses of readers, and form a new ecology of copyright protection led by the government, jointly built by the industry, enabled by science and technology, and the masses." Chen Shaoling said.
