Produced by Radar Finance and | Zhang Kaijing, editor| deep sea
On December 15, the China Online Audiovisual Program Service Association issued the Detailed Rules for the Standard Review of Online Short Video Content (2021), which clearly requires that short video programs and other short video programs must not appear "unauthorized, self-cutting and adaptation of films, TV series, online film and television dramas and other types of audiovisual programs and fragments".
Radar Finance noted that the incident triggered heated discussion among netizens, and related topics quickly rushed to Weibo's hot search.
"Are you going to kill the second creation?" Some netizens commented, and some netizens sighed: "Then watching small videos is no fun", "This is forcing to watch film and television drama programs without standards, and finally no one even watches these, then the platform is waiting to eat the northwest wind." ”
Behind the hot discussion of netizens is the huge attention of short videos such as film and television editing. Previously, according to the statistics of Securities Times, the number of fans on the Douyin platform alone exceeded one million, and there were more than 100 film and television drama editing bloggers who were more active in updating. A head blogger released a total of 343 edited film and television drama videos, with 170 million likes, and an average of nearly 500,000 likes for a single video.
According to the "2020 China Online Short Video Copyright Monitoring Report", from January 2019 to October 2020, the results of monitoring more than 100,000 original short video authors, the national copyright administration's early warning list and the fragmented short videos of key film and television variety works show that a total of 30.0952 million suspected infringing short videos were monitored, involving 2.72 trillion hits.
In contrast, long-form video platforms have always been determined to eliminate such short videos.
In April this year, the long video platform led by "Aiyouteng" joined hands with 54 film and television companies and 514 industry insiders to continuously issue initiatives calling on short video platform operators to respect originality and protect copyrights; in May, Aiyouteng issued a statement condemning B station on the grounds that a large number of infringing pirated videos appeared on the B station a few hours after the "Friends Reunion Special" was launched.
In June, Sun Zhonghuai, vice president of Tencent and CEO of Online Video, said at the 9th China Online Audiovisual Conference: "For a long time, this kind of disassembly of long video content has not only infringed the copyright of film and television works, but also dissolved the artistic value of film and television works. This not only hit the creative enthusiasm of the head creators, but also undermined the normal order of the market, affected the long-term development of the industry, and ultimately led to the damage to the interests of users, creators, film and television practitioners, platforms and other parties. ”
In August, Tencent Video also sued Douyin for copyright infringement and unfair competition, claiming 100 million yuan. It is reported that Tencent targeted the phenomenon that the popular drama "Sweeping Black Storm" at that time had users uploading relevant episodes on Douyin.
Is short video chasing illegal? Many lawyers believe that as long as the cut material is someone else's original film and television work or soundtrack, it has exceeded the scope of fair use, after all, many short video platforms will calculate revenue according to the number of video clicks and likes, which will make the behavior of bloggers be characterized as commercial behavior.
In addition, it is reported that many film and television editing accounts use the traffic attracted by free handling to monetize, including selling editing instructional videos and editing training classes.
However, in the eyes of industry insiders, the more important point is that the short video chase has touched the cake of long videos.
"In the end, it's all about the race for user time. We have an average of one film and television drama on the line, from the previous 1.5 months to the current 8-12 months, how can this be opposed to the rapid production of short videos and multi-line competition? A person can't sleep, and the first thing he thinks about will be vibrato, not a movie or TV series. Rong Zhen, manager and director of Beijing True Leaf Culture Co., Ltd., sighed.
In 2019, for the first time, China's short video users used more time than long videos; as of December 2020, the number of short video users had reached 873 million, and as of March this year, the average daily usage time of short video users reached 125 minutes.
On the long video side, not only the advertising share has been robbed, the number of paid member users has also peaked, in order to improve the level of profitability, iQiyi has continuously increased the price of members in November 2020 and December 2021, but still can not avoid huge losses.
According to public data, iQiyi's net loss in the first three quarters of 2021 was 4.4 billion yuan, and the three major domestic long-form video head platforms of IYoteng burned more than 100 billion yuan in the past 10 years.
However, can resisting short video infringement turn around long video platforms?
Sun Zhonghuai himself has pointed out that an important reason for the popularity of short videos of cut-and-strip handling is the injection of water into long video content. The excessive content cost is an important reason why long-term video platforms are difficult to turn over.
According to the prospectus of Lemon Film, the company has only produced and released 7 dramas in the past three years, with an average of between 40-50 episodes, but the procurement cost paid by Tencent Video for it in three years alone has reached 2.332 billion yuan; compared with the recent global hit "Squid Game" from Netflix, the total investment is only about 100 million yuan.
Therefore, some lawyers believe that if a cooperative business model is established between long video and short video platforms, it may be possible to improve revenue while regulating video content. For example, the long video platform can restrict the right to use, such as time, etc. at the time of licensing; or like music, centralize the management and authorization of all copyrights; or the platform can find a copyright owner to cooperate in the overall form, and then charge corresponding fees according to the click rate and traffic of the up owner.
Industry insiders believe that even if the two sides can really go in the same direction, the middle will inevitably go through a long run-in process.
Note: This article is the original of Radar Finance (ID: leidacj). Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.