Brief facts of the case

A cultural media company is a marketing and publicity service company in the entire entertainment industry chain, which relies on Internet media platforms to operate entertainment accounts to publish short videos, and has 5 million fans. The company found that an account on the Internet platform was suspected of infringement, and the account had a similar avatar and the same name as the entertainment account it operated, and the content of the short videos published was also highly consistent. A cultural media company then sued the court, demanding that the technology company and related platforms to which the account belonged immediately stop the porting, delete the relevant infringing short videos, and compensate a total of 1.37 million yuan for economic losses and rights protection costs.

The defendant, a technology company, argued that the short video involved in the case was not directly carried by it. Instead, a cultural media company in Guangxi uploads it to its own content library through a network background, and uses video content to generate revenue. Second, the short video involved in the case is not a "work" protected under the Copyright Law. The content of the short video published by the plaintiff is an edit of celebrity gossip content, which does not meet the requirements of the Copyright Law on "originality" of intellectual achievements, and does not have a legal source of rights. At the same time, the defendant stated that the number of views of the short video involved in the case published on one of its own websites was extremely low, and the amount of compensation claimed by the plaintiff was obviously abnormally high.

Heard by the courts

After the trial, the court held that the plaintiff's account had published a large number of short video commentary works in the entertainment industry on relevant Internet media platforms, and formed a new video with its own style through the selection, combination, design, and comment of existing material segments, which reflected the expression of the creator's personalized thoughts, which was substantially different from the original work, had originality, and was an audiovisual work protected by the Copyright Law. The defendant registered an account with the same name and similar avatar as the plaintiff without authorization, and uploaded a large number of short video works for which the plaintiff enjoyed copyright, infringing the plaintiff's right to disseminate information on the relevant works, and should bear the responsibility of stopping the infringement and compensating for losses. Since there was no evidence to prove the actual losses suffered by the plaintiff due to the infringement, and it was difficult to determine the benefits obtained by the defendant, the court ordered the defendant technology company to compensate the plaintiff a cultural media company for economic losses and reasonable expenses for rights protection totaling more than 40,000 yuan, and to delete all the infringing short videos on the platform, taking into account the originality, creation difficulty, popularity and social value of the works involved, as well as the nature of the infringement and the number of infringing videos. The defendant company appealed, and the court of second instance upheld the original judgment.

What the judge said

Secondary creation of short videos refers to short videos that are built on the basis of existing copyrighted audiovisual works and recreated using video materials. However, this kind of re-creation is not a direct transfer or plagiarism of the original video, but a script, with a certain character, story line or directly based on the original video, giving a new perspective, using adaptation, commentary, spoof, parody, mixed editing, splicing, quotation and other creative techniques to integrate the re-creation of the original innovative elements. In determining whether it has crossed the red line of infringement, it is necessary to comprehensively consider the expression of ideas, whether it constitutes substantial sameness, whether it seizes the market share of the original work, and whether it obtains commercial benefits. China's Internet penetration rate is more than 70%, and there are more than 1 billion Internet users. Netizens are the cornerstone of Internet culture, and they are both viewers and authors, and only when the overall copyright awareness of netizens is improved, so that they can consciously protect their own copyrights and consciously not infringe on the copyrights of others, can the situation of infringement in the video industry be improved.

This article is transferred from the "People's Court Daily", thank you here!