Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

A record, Douyin was sentenced to 32.4 million.

Since September last year, the much-publicized case of "Yunnan Bug Valley" in which Tencent sued Douyin for infringement finally landed on the ground. On October 26, the Xi'an Intermediate people's Court issued a judgment of first instance. The court held that although Douyin had taken measures to reduce the number of infringing works, the infringement had not been effectively curbed, so there was a relevant decision.

The figure of 32.4 million far exceeds the record of the amount of judgment in such cases. According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 2500 video copyright judgments in China in 2021, of which the average compensation for TV series is less than 500000 yuan, and the highest value is only about 2 million yuan. In response, the person in charge of Douyin legal affairs said he would appeal the case.

Kuaishou was also awarded a total compensation of more than 218,000 yuan for infringing Nirvana in Fire and Old Nine doors, according to the judgment document of China referee Writing website on October 31. By comparison, we can see that the figure of 32.4 million yuan is exaggerated.

Almost at the same time, two head players in the short video industry have been suppressed by the long video field, and the conflict between the two sides is getting worse. In this article, "New position" will focus on what revived the video that was reluctant to keep the peace, who started the dispute over the length of the video, and what is it?

First of all, let's take a look at the origin of the dispute, which goes back to 2021, during which two things happened:

In January and April, the long video platform represented by you Aiteng, together with some film and television companies, associations and artists, issued a joint statement to boycott editing and handling, targeting short videos, and the dispute began to come to light.

In February and June, at the 9th China online Audiovisual Conference, Tencent online video CEO Sun Zhonghuai openly said that "people who watch brainwashing videos outside public places are like fools" and "you like pig food and all you see is pig food".

The sky-high price claim is 32.4 million, with an average of more than 2 million per episode, which is 16 times the highest recorded last year, or even hundreds of times that of some similar cases. This amount is not only the highest compensation Tencent has received in film and television copyright cases, but also set a new record of compensation in similar cases across the country. how did this figure be obtained?

In fact, Tencent's initial claim was only 10 million yuan, but it was only before the trial that the claim was temporarily changed, raising the claim to 90 million yuan, an increase of nearly tenfold.

The reason for this adjustment cannot be determined, but a message worth noting is that in August last year, Douyin was sued by Tencent for copyright infringement and unfair competition for failing to delete the short video of "Arena of Valor" on the platform. and claim 5.2 million yuan. Finally, the Shenzhen Intermediate people's Court of first instance ordered Douyin to compensate Tencent 500000 yuan in economic losses and 100000 yuan in reasonable rights protection expenses, which is 10 times different from the claim amount.

Just to make a guess, taking the proportion of the claim and the judgment amount in the "Arena of Valor case" as a reference, perhaps the logic of "price increase" of 10 times has a source to follow:

The court upheld the claim amount of 1x10, which increased the claim tenfold to raise the upper limit of the judgment. For example, in December 2021, Tencent also applied to the court to change the lawsuit request, increasing the claim amount of "Doluo mainland" from 61.6 million yuan to 800 million yuan (the case is still under trial).

In addition, it is reported that in less than half a year from June to December 10, 2021, Tencent sued Douyin 168 times in 18 courts in 13 provinces, with a total amount of more than 2.943 billion yuan. Among them, there were four cases with more than 100 million yuan, with the highest claim of 800 million yuan from "Durotang", followed by "you are my glory" with 755 million yuan.

Behind the sky-high price claim, is Tencent Video looking for compensation for the content cost, or is it something else? As a representative case, does this indicate that copyright, as a traditional weapon in the long video industry, will help enterprises make more "new achievements" in the future?

Looking back on the last round of copyright disputes in the video industry, and comparing with this round of disputes, we find that although the core of using copyright as a weapon remains unchanged, under different competitive backgrounds, the two rounds of disputes seem to have different settlement logic and trend. On the whole, the future is open and bright.

02, "concerted Action" disintegrated in 2013, the copyright war ignited for Fast broadcast and iqiyi. On November 13 of this year, in the face of the strength of fast broadcasting and the rise of iqiyi, dozens of industry representatives, including Youku Tudou Group, Tencent Video, Sohu Video, Leeco, and so on, jointly launched the "China online Video Anti-Piracy" activity. and together with other film associations to sue Baidu and Kuaidi for piracy and infringement.

Interestingly, leading brother Youku was the target of the copyright war just last year (2012).

Youku, which had just acquired Tudou, was a combination of No. 1 and No. 2 in the online video industry, with user coverage as high as 80% at one point. On April 24, 2012, iqiyi, Tencent Video and Sohu reached an agreement to jointly form a "Video content Cooperation Organization (VCC)" to cooperate in the fields of copyright and broadcasting, with the real purpose of encircling and suppressing Youku.

Obviously, the banner of a copyright war like this has always been "justice", and its essence has always been about interests: those who have the potential and those who are threatened will be attacked by the masses. However, history tells us that those who gather together because of the common prosperity of interests will eventually disintegrate because of the uneven distribution of interests. Facts have also proved that with the lag of Youku, coupled with the serious homogenization of products and models between each other, former alliance members have already turned against each other.

There was fierce competition and internal friction among online video platforms, which continued until the rise of short videos, and several head platforms once again joined forces, although they did not hold a "martial arts conference." but it can be called a factual "concerted actor" at the action level:

On the one hand, in June 2021, Youai Teng United platform, attracted many enterprises and artists who admired its breath, and jointly opposed the short video, calling the second creation an alternative piracy of infringement.

On the other hand, the three companies have also formed a price alliance to reduce producers' prices upstream to reduce costs, and to launch advanced on-demand downstream to harvest users to increase profits.

However, unlike the round of copyright disputes a decade ago, when the copyright alliance ended with the downfall of an imaginary enemy, the "concerted actors" in this round of copyright disputes appeared to be "inconsistent" in less than a year.

In March 2022, Sohu Douyin reached a cooperation. Douyin was licensed for the second creation of all Sohu's homemade film and television works.

In June 2022, Kuaishou also announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with Letv, allowing Kuaishou creators to edit and re-create Letv's video exclusive self-made copyright works.

In July 2022, Douyin successfully held hands with iqiyi to reach a cooperation on its film and television rights. In the clips of mass entrepreneurship and innovation on Douyin, it can even be directly directed to iqiyi's video platform.

* the new position Cartographic Chief Video Alliance broke itself, and the "people acting in unison" automatically disintegrated because: the last round of encirclement and suppression was a matter of competition within the online video industry. There was only one leading position in the industry, and the contradiction was irreconcilable. The contradiction between long and short videos is not a contradiction between the interests of enterprises, but a change in the trend of the times, and negative confrontation can never change the direction of the wheel of history.

Obviously, just as at that time, traditional TV stations were unable to change the rise of PC and the Internet, unable to stop users from moving from radio and television to online streaming platforms, and today's YouTube can't change the trend of the times, allowing users to put down their mobile phones and return to PC and tablets to pay for pipelined production of highly homogeneous dramas.

Because with the progress of semiconductor process and the upgrading of network transmission technology, computing and interactive devices from large to small, and then to lightweight portable, and then to the future wearable, and even implantable in the future, this is an irreversible trend. And the equipment with different characteristics at different stages, obviously the most suitable products and content forms are all different.

Under the portable characteristics and screen limitations of mobile phones, short video is only the trend of the times, not the private enemy of an enterprise, and even most enterprises, including media information platform and e-commerce platform, integrate the short video form into their own products. Therefore, there has never been a dispute between the so-called long and short video form, there is no irreconcilable contradiction between the platforms, there is only a trade-off under the trend of the times.

And you Aiteng people, because of their different ecological groups, different industry status, different corporate culture, naturally there are differences in the choice.

Tencent Video can't get out of Tencent less than a week apart. The two judgments involving iqiyi and Tencent Video are very different in terms of amount:

The copyright dispute between iqiyi and Kuaishou involved Nirvana in Fire and Nine Men in Fire, which was well-known and the verdict was only 2.18 million yuan, while the copyright dispute between Tencent Video and Douyin involved Yunnan Worm Valley, which was less well-known, but the claim amount was as high as 90 million yuan and the judgment amount was 32.4 million yuan.

Is it because iqiyi made a profit and Tencent Video lost money, and the latter has to make up for it through copyright claims, so as to smooth out the losses caused by "Street-bashing dramas" with legal revenue? Maybe this reason can be part of it, but it is by no means the real reason for the sky-high price claim. Because also taking history as a mirror, the purpose of war has never been for the materials seized on the battlefield, but to achieve the deterrence of force and the monopoly of power.

The ultimate purpose of the sky-high price claim is to deter, and the meaning of deterrence is to maintain its "monopoly" position in a certain field unchallenged and to stabilize the "power" conferred by this status.

For example, if players record a video of their own game and post it on a short video platform, will it cause direct economic loss or indirect revenue reduction to the game? Should not, really say the impact, but also to promote the role of the game. Therefore, the production company of a certain game will not really suffer losses for the second creation of the game, which will lead to a strong sky-high price claim deterrent.

What really leads to the "stress reaction" is its position and voice in the game industry, which is not what every game company has and craves, which also leads to the relevant cases that we can see. It often occurs only between fixed subjects.

Switching this logic from the gaming industry to the video industry is still valid.

For BAT, standing at the time point of 2022, expectations for Ai Youteng have changed, some as a part of the ecology, and some as just a profitable business. For the latter, it is clear that there is no need for sky-high claims to maintain "deterrence".

Reviewing Tencent's business resume, it has a clearly similar path to success in the content industry, that is, the gaming, music and video industries:

First rely on replacing / providing some games, songs and dramas to accumulate early users. After having a certain user scale and a stable business model, Tencent's role has changed from channel "merchant" to channel "square". From providing services to controlling resources, and then monopolizing the voice in a certain industry segment.

For example, in the game industry, by acting as an agent for DNF, CF, LOL and other games in the early years, Tencent not only earned the first bucket of gold, but also mastered the right of "distribution" established on the basis of game users and users, and firmly grasped the lifeline of small and medium-sized game enterprises by setting up a game platform to distribute games.

"New position" refers to this evolution path from channel merchant to channel side as "Tencent model". Obviously, Tencent Video can not get out of Tencent model. More importantly, Tencent Video can not get out of the "Tencent ecology".

On the morning of July 19, shortly after Douyin iqiyi announced his cooperation, there were rumors that Kuaishou Tencent also had an intention to cooperate, but Tencent couldn't wait to deny this claim at noon that day. Why does Tencent avoid rumors of cooperation with Kuaishou, even if it is not with Douyin?

Because Tencent's way of playing in the content industry has always been very clear, which is to build a whole set of "IP (novel)-content (drama animation game)-communication (announcement discussion and creation)" ecosystem. Among them, the dissemination and dissemination of this link will be more likely to occur on the short video platform in the future. After all, as a new focus of traffic, today, most of the heat and topics have been born from the short video platform.

Based on this logic and its near monopoly in the IP field, Tencent will never give up its idea of making short videos, just as Tencent Video, who has been losing money for years, will never give up. As a result, Sohu, Letv, and iqiyi can all reconcile with short videos, but not Tencent Video, which is the root cause of such disparity in the amount of judgments in the two copyright cases in less than a week.

04. What needs to be stated at the end of this article is that the position of this article is not to support piracy or to disrespect copyright. The "New position" has always supported copyright owners to safeguard their own rights and interests through legal channels.

But the problem is that, like Musk's view of "patents and innovation", copyright is originally set up to protect creation, but its actual use has become an obstacle to creation.

In December 2021, the computer Daily conducted an experiment in which several unauthorized video clips were uploaded to mainstream short and long video platforms at the same time. Contrary to the subconscious conclusion, short video platforms were the first to remove infringing works from the shelves. The awareness of copyright protection is also stronger than that of long video platforms.

The long video industry has been difficult to make a profit for many years, and the crux of the problem is that several companies are deadlocked with each other, and the industry is already facing a decline before it can achieve unity and profitability, which is not as good as that of the online music industry. Today, the emergence of short videos provides an opportunity for the stalemate. Perhaps with the outbreak of content and the relocation of communication positions, the market pattern of the long video industry will have new variables.

From the various actions of Aiyou Teng three this year, we can clearly see that for the attitude of the short video platform, some light players have begun to try to change from boycott to hug. Some players with a wider layout have chosen to increase the intensity of the confrontation again, and the success or failure of right or wrong may soon be known.

* the problem pictures and the pictures in the article come from the network.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: new position NewPosition (ID:xinlichangNP), author: VV, Editor: Li Fan

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