Technology aids in licensing, fight against piracy

Intellectual property rights are the heart of all cultural business, and modern technology such as big data and cloud computing will provide solutions for new copyright challenges in the era of digital publication, said a senior executive in the industry at a recent forum in Beijing.

"Copyright trade and profit are still operating on a small scale in China, and there are many problems in the industrial chain," said Sui Xin, deputy general manager of Sino-Cloud Culture at Bigdata Technology Co Ltd, at a summit of the fifth International Broadcasting Development Forum last week.

Sui's company is the operator of the Copyright Cloud Project, part of the China Culture Data Industry program, a key program for the cultural sector in the national 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).

He said the problems include a lack of professional third-party service providers, rampant piracy and excessive licensing fees.

"The traditional publication business is being digitized, so is piracy - it has become as simple as a copy-and-paste model," Sui said, adding that online literature suffered total losses of about 7.8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) to piracy in 2014, including 3.5 billion yuan just from mobile terminals.

Investors tend to focus on widely popular works and rush for adaptation rights, pushing licensing fees up to an irrationally high level.

In 2013, China's leading video streaming website iQiyi, under IT giant Baidu Inc, ran a deficit of 743 million yuan. The number increased to 2.4 billion yuan in 2015 due to a five-fold surge in content cost, according to Baidu's annual report.

Based in Guizhou province, China's big-data industry center, the Copyright Cloud Project aims to build the "root servers" for the nation's cultural industry, Sui said.

It has planned investment of more than 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion), and is designed to have 100,000 servers, capable of more than 1,000 petabytes of data storage, in the next three to five years.

The project has two databases - one for genuine works nationwide and the other for pirated versions for comparison, allowing real-time surveillance and identification of piracy. It also involves copyright registration, trade and settlement mechanisms.

Internet-based piracy leaves traces on the servers, which could be detected using cloud computing, comparison and identification technologies, Sui told China Daily.

Although the pirates are also innovating their methods, the Copyright Cloud will use more advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to improve its online content supervision ability, Sui said.

"When we have all the information for works under supervision, finding and fighting against the pirated versions will be much easier," he said. "The system can even be used for prevention."

The platform has been used in the annual Jianwang Operation, a national campaign run by multiple authorities in enforcement against online piracy.

"The core part of investigating internet-based cases is collecting evidence, and we can help the enforcement agencies by providing large amounts of digital evidence, and offer one-stop legal service to the rights owners," Sui said.

The company purchased cutting-edge technology from around the world, and developed its own technology, including copyright stamps and real-time settlement.

The combination of the two techniques allows an author to earn his licensing fee automatically when his registered works are used by others.

The Copyright Cloud will also cover trademarked and patented businesses in the future, and the company expects to cooperate with more government agencies and companies in the industry as the project becomes a larger part of the national strategy, Sui added.

zhangzhao@chinadaily.com.cn