According to the official website of the National Copyright Administration, during the Spring Festival of 2021, seven Chinese New Year movie theaters including "Hi Mom" were widely welcomed, setting a new box office record for Chinese New Year movie theaters, but the issue of film piracy has also attracted attention. In order to regulate the copyright order of the film market, the Copyright Administration of the Central Propaganda Department, the Film Bureau of the Central Propaganda Department, and the Food and Drug Crime Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security jointly deployed a centralized action to combat film pirates and dissemination in cinemas, and adopted various effective measures to crack down on the Spring Festival Theatrical film pirated recording and spreading illegal and criminal acts.
One is to deploy early warning protection. On February 8, the National Copyright Administration released the "2021 Early Warning List of the Second Batch of Key Works Copyright Protection", which included seven Chinese New Year movie theaters including "Hi Mom" into the early warning protection, and required content, storage, and search links, E-commerce websites, application stores, and other network service providers take effective measures to prevent and deal with infringement and piracy such as the pirated recording and transmission of cinema movies in time.
The second is to strengthen inspection and monitoring. Local copyright and film authorities have strengthened the management of movie theaters, strictly guarded against secret photography and recording, and increased network inspections and piracy monitoring. The monitoring results show that there is no phenomenon of infringement and piracy of movies on the Spring Festival file on regular video sites. Pirated content and links are mostly spread illegally through social platforms, online disks, e-commerce platforms, and undocumented "three noes" small sites, most of which " The server of the "Three Nothing" small website is located overseas.
The third is to quickly deal with infringements. Local copyright and film authorities arrange multi-shift duty and multi-line response, carefully screen and systematically sort out the complaints of rights holders and the information reported by the masses, and supervise all social platforms, online disks, e-commerce platforms and other network service providers to take emergency measures to delete infringing information quickly. As of February 24, various online platforms had handled 23,726 infringing links of movie theaters related to the Spring Festival.
The fourth is to investigate and handle major cases. Local copyright and film authorities and public security agencies have strengthened clues and investigations, and actively expanded the source of the case. A number of suspects of stealing photography and recording have been investigated and locked, and the public security agency has carried out criminal investigations to pursue criminal responsibility for criminals in accordance with the law, and promote the investigation and handling of the case to trace the source, destroy the gang and the network.
In the next step, the concentrated action will dig deeper into the source of piracy, increase efforts to crack down on sneak shots and pirated recordings in theaters, severely investigate and punish websites (APP), WeChat public accounts, and e-commerce operators that sell and distribute pirated films, and urge all network platforms to strengthen their businesses’ subject responsibility, and severely punished in accordance with the law for acts of pirating and disseminating cinema-line movies that have strong opinions from the right holder and cause great social harm.
The person in charge of the Copyright Administration of the Central Propaganda Department stated that the central government attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights and continues to increase its crackdown on infringement and piracy. The Criminal Law Amendment (11) will come into effect on March 1, raising the maximum sentence for copyright infringement to 10 years. It is hoped that various theatres, online platforms, and industry associations will strengthen cooperation with law enforcement agencies so that the general public will consciously resist piracy, and actively report to law enforcement agencies if they find secret photography, pirated recordings, and infringement dissemination, jointly combat infringement and piracy and create respect for copyright and create good social atmosphere to promote the prosperity and healthy development of the film industry.
