Intellectual Property Protection is Stepping up in China

It’s a known fact that in China, intellectual properties (IP) aren’t very much protected. But things are changing.

At the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) pre-event dinner that ended just a couple of hours ago, Kaiser Kuo of Baidu talked about IP issues in the country and the recent developments involving his company.

In the past two months, we have seen several copyright issues between various organizations and Baidu: (1) Japanese publishers wanting Baidu to remove pirated manga results, (2) the Wenku problem with Chinese writers and (3) the latest copyright issue on music downloads.

Problem (1) and (2) are solved. As for problem (3), Kuo said,

“We signed a landmark deal with the music copyright society of china where we will now be compensating song writers and lyricists directly through the music copyright society of China for songs that are linked to by Baidu mp3 service.”

As I said yesterday, I expected Baidu to solve these issues fast and it did.” This [the deal] is a really game changing thing. I urge everyone to watch this space,” he added.

Wenku can be a very powerful distribution platform for publishers, and Kaiser said that Baidu is willing to work hand-in-hand with them to make money together:

“We are not standing here thumbing our nosesly at either the publishers or the music industry at all. We are looking for ways to bring them into the modern world,” Kuo said.

IP protection is stepping up in China but it is also important to keep things in perspective. Alvin Wang, CEO of mInfo said that China still has a long way to go towards its battle against piracy. The picture isn’t rosy, but it is certainly a good start.

On a related note, Chinese video site Youku is working towards creating original video content, while e-commerce site, Taobao is working with brands like Apple and Gucci to fight counterfeit product listed on its site.

As for Baidu, it’s interesting that it is facing many of the same obstacles that big players like Amazon (with it’s recent cloud player), and Apple (with Lala perpetually in its back pocket) are facing – only in a different environment. Persuading rights holders that digital distribution will be more lucrative than litigation is not easy, no matter what country you’re in.