Web giant tackles legal hot potato

The Spring Festival is normally a time for people to relax and enjoy themselves. But for Tudou.com, China's leading video-sharing website, it was a time for it to gird its loins for a potentially bloody legal battle.

Over the holiday, more than 80 domestic copyright holders, including fellow video website Joy.cn, Beijing Polybona Film Distribution, Jiangsu Shengshi Film and Orange Sky Entertainment Group, gathered to form an "anti-piracy alliance", contending that Tudou was providing unauthorized content.

According to legal sources in Shanghai, Tudou is expected to face a total of 14 lawsuits at the city's Pudong District People's Court between Feb 9 and 26 for allegedly uploading pirated content, with half of these challenges coming from Joy.

In fact, "this is the recommencement of a battle which took place last year between Joy and Tudou", an official surnamed Liu from CINIC (China Internet Network Information Center) told China Business Weekly.

Joy claimed that, since the end of 2007, Tudou had uploaded exclusive videos belonging to it on Tudou's front page, without obtaining authorization from copyright owners.

Last April, Joy filed a lawsuit against Tudou. But before the verdict could be announced, Tudou announced it would delete the pirated content and pay compensation to Joy.

"However, Tudou's copyright infringement activities did not stop after that lawsuit," alleged Joy President Zhang He.

Making a similar claim, media firm Orange Sky Group said that some of its videos had been shown on Tudou without the consent of copyright owners.

"As a leading domestic video-sharing website, Tudou should be a copyright supervisor and protector, not a copyright infringer. At the same time, it should also shoulder the responsibility for protecting the rights of authentic videos and promoting the fair and healthy development of the film and online video industries," Zhang stressed.

Huang Huiwen, Tudou's vice-president, hit back at the alliance's claims. He said that the firm paid a great deal of attention to video copyrights, and Tudou had a system in place to deal with any problems in this regard.

"In addition, we actively cooperate with many copyright owners, such as the Motion Picture Association of America, in order to control pirated videos in a timely manner," Huang added.

According to Huang, Tudou receives up to 30,000 messages a month from its partners regarding unauthorized videos. Tudou deletes as many as 24,000 pirated videos from its website every month, he pointed out.

However, the "timely deletion of pirated videos does not mean the website can escape the blame for uploading unauthorized videos," said Yu Guofu, a lawyer from Beijing Sam & Partners Law Firm.

Yu added that alleged copyright infringement activities had plagued China's video-sharing market in recent years.

"The reason for this is the unhealthy way in which video websites operate, with the uploading of videos without adequate supervision and then the deletion of pirated items when a warning is received from copyright owners," said Yu.

Driven by its strong package of authorized and unauthorized video sources, Tudou won remarkable traffic and fruitful advertising revenue last year, according to a statement from the alliance.

According to statistics from the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia, Tudou's advertising revenue topped $1.65 million in the first half of last year.

"Tudou's unhealthy mode of running video sources has already seriously infringed the interests of copyright owners and affects overall market development," Joy's Zhang said.

Yu from Beijing Sam & Partners Law Firm said that such an unhealthy operational mode had resulted in competitors such as Joy suffering a drop in advertising revenues and traffic.

According to Zhang, the anti-piracy alliance has been formed to secure stronger copyright protection rules for China's video-sharing website industry.

"Seeking a profit is natural in the world of business. But the development of video websites should rely on a healthier industry value chain and profit-making mode," Liu from CINIC said, adding that this should be based on actively purchasing the copyrights of video products, and winning traffic and advertising through the creation of more value-added services.