Copyright bureau publishes list of music for protection

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Copyright will release a list of 10,000 pieces of music that it will focus on this year, a senior official said.

Part of the Hits Musical, an online copyright protection program that started at the end of 2015, the list is due to be released in late April or early May, said Wang Yefei, deputy director of the bureau, at a news conference in Beijing on Thursday.

The Beijing copyright administration has made the protection of music copyright a priority of its work agenda during the past five years, with a focus on online music in 2015, Wang said.

To date, more than 10 major music portals have reported to the bureau approximately 20,000 works of music.

Based on the candidates, "we are working out a list of 10,000 works of music and trying to figure out their rights' owners and users", Wang said. "Compared with other copyrighted products, musical works are complicated in ownership."

"The program, in essence, puts the administration's supervision emphasis on the most popular musical works to increase efficiency and accuracy in fighting piracy," he said.

Resolving around the list, the government will target its online supervision at major music portals as well as small and medium-sized websites, he added.

Wang said he expected the list to expand to 100,000 entries in three to five years, which would be equivalent to more than half of the current total number of online musical works.

With improvements in fighting piracy of listed works, there would then be a fundamental change in the entire online music market, he said.

Wang Ningzhi, deputy chief of Beijing's cultural market enforcement, said his team focuses on infringements on large-investment TV series and dramas online and keeps a close eye on video portals.

His team has expanded its force targeted at online piracy and forged a partnership with major dotcoms involving video businesses. Its partners include Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and Sohu.

At the same time, popular entertainment shows and sports events such as The Voice of China, I Am a Singer, and the Chinese Super League, China's top annual professional soccer league competition, are also included into the range for priority supervision, he said.

Government data shows that the enforcement team investigated nearly 10,000 copyright violations and fined infringers more than 13 million yuan ($2 million) in the city in 2015. In addition, they also patrolled more than 2,700 websites last year.

"We are using high-tech means to explore new modes against online piracy and conducting research into mobile games for better protection," he said.

Zhu Jianhong, spokesman for the Beijing IP office, said the city has made "marked progress" in IP creation, enforcement and international exchanges over the past five years.

The 2015 Intellectual Property Rights Protection in Beijing, a report released at the meeting, shows that the city saw an average annual growth of 19.44 percent in patent filings and 22.9 percent in patents secured during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15).

As a result, the number of invention patents per 10,000 people in the Beijing population reached 61.3 by the end of 2015, enabling the city to rank top of the country.

More than 692,000 trademarks are from Beijing filers over the past five years, including 220 granted the status of China's well-known trademarks and 663 gaining the honor of the city's famous trademark.

Beijing imported more than 8,900 copyrights, with 28 involving software, 111 over e-publications and 8,806 related to books, over the five-year period.

Within Beijing, nearly 64,000 software copyrights were registered, accounting for 21.9 percent of the country's total, and those for non-software numbered 601,000 during the same period.