From the perspective of the development of retail e-commerce platforms, whether it is traditional shelf-type e-commerce, or innovative retail e-commerce business models such as social e-commerce and content e-commerce, "intellectual property protection" is one of the foundations for the innovative development of the e-commerce industry, and it is also a common issue facing the entire e-commerce industry.
- For the platform, attaching importance to the protection of intellectual property rights and establishing a good platform operating environment are conducive to healthy competition among merchants;
- For consumers, it can protect the rights and interests of consumers and improve the user experience;
- From the perspective of the industry, it provides a better guarantee for the high-quality development of product and service innovation and realizes the healthy development of the industry.
On August 31, 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation publicly solicited opinions on the revision of the relevant provisions of the E-commerce Law on intellectual property protection, further increasing the penalties for infringement of intellectual property rights, and better protecting intellectual property rights holders, of which the relevant provisions will also apply to new e-commerce platforms such as live e-commerce and community group buying.
With the development of innovative business models, traditional e-commerce platforms have gradually laid out graphics, short videos and live broadcasts to supplement the content guide of shelf-type e-commerce, while content e-commerce represented by Douyin interest e-commerce has become more complex and independent from the difference in business models, the diversification of scenes to the participation of platforms, which poses more stringent challenges to intellectual property protection.
The challenge of content e-commerce platforms in "intellectual property protection"
Judging from the long-term research of "Zhuang Shuai Retail E-commerce Channel", the operation mode of the traditional shelf-type e-commerce platform is around "goods", and intellectual property protection is naturally also established around "goods":
The first is the original protection of the "display of goods", that is, product videos, head pictures and product detail maps;
The second is to deal with the problem of counterfeit goods and infringement in the supply chain link of the "source of goods";
The third is the extension of the protection of trademarks, copyrights, etc. by co-brands.
After more than 20 years of development, traditional e-commerce platforms have rich governance experience in the protection of intellectual property rights of "goods", and their technical means and operational capabilities have been continuously strengthened.
Through the in-depth analysis of content e-commerce, in the process of the rapid development of new formats, the content e-commerce platform represented by Douyin e-commerce also faces the problem of "intellectual property protection" involved in the supply chain and operation in the development process of traditional e-commerce.
If content e-commerce platforms want to do a good job in "intellectual property protection", they need to learn from the experience and rules of traditional e-commerce platforms in "intellectual property protection".
Secondly, the shopping link of Douyin interested in e-commerce, due to the addition of short video and live broadcast "content" form, the formation of "content - live broadcast - commodity" shopping link, and the traditional shelf e-commerce is very different, so there are also two differences in "intellectual property protection":
First, the integration of "content" and "e-commerce" makes the link of intellectual property protection more complicated
Unlike the shelf-type e-commerce platform, which mainly carries out platform construction in the dimension of "goods", in addition to the operation of goods on the platform, there are also operations and creations in the form of "content" of short videos and live broadcasts, and there is a close connection between content and goods.
Then, in terms of intellectual property protection, Douyin must not only carry out governance and prevention and control of goods and content separately, but also review the relevance of goods and content, which needs to be evaluated from multiple dimensions to avoid the problem of "the content is not a problem but matches the fake goods, or the infringement information in the content affects the image of the genuine brand", which requires the development of new technical capabilities to explore the rule system of the "content -live broadcast-goods" full link.
Second, the infringement scenario is more diversified than the traditional e-commerce model
Douyin e-commerce is based on content as the core, and users promote the purchase conversion of goods through interest in content. Different from the supplementary positioning of shelf-type e-commerce to the content shopping guide model, the content of Douyin e-commerce is larger, the review scene is more complex, and the scope of intellectual property protection of content also involves audio and video copyright, copyright of works, etc., far beyond the scope of review of traditional e-commerce.
At the same time, the content will have a direct connection with the user, in addition to the passive prevention and control of disputes, the pre-installation infringement prevention and control is also very necessary to avoid the risk of the platform.
Faced with a more complex "intellectual property protection" system in the process of "content" and "e-commerce" integration, on March 18, Douyin E-commerce released the "2021 Intellectual Property Protection Report" (hereinafter referred to as the report), which presents the efforts of Douyin e-commerce in intellectual property protection in the past year, providing experience and reference for the content e-commerce industry, and further observing the effectiveness of Douyin e-commerce in intellectual property protection with an open and cooperative mindset.
The method and value of "intellectual property protection" of Douyin e-commerce
Through the research of "Zhuang Shuai Retail E-commerce Channel", since its establishment in June 2020, Douyin E-commerce has established six major business modules of copyright protection, active prevention and control, complaint handling, brand cooperation, offline crackdown and public education, and from the perspective of these six business modules, Douyin E-commerce has established a relatively comprehensive business structure and governance capabilities in intellectual property protection.
Based on the closely related characteristics of the "content" and "e-commerce" of the interest e-commerce, IPPRO, the official rights protection platform launched by Douyin E-commerce, is the first platform in the industry to realize the protection of goods and content at the same time.
For e-commerce platform operators or creators, by completing the filing of intellectual property rights, they can initiate rights protection and complaints online through the system to achieve comprehensive online rights protection.
By the end of 2021, IPPRO had provided services for 3,900 rights holders and 6,409 intellectual property rights filings, accepted more than 10,000 infringement complaints, and deleted more than 48,000 infringing links.
In addition to the complaint handling of the infringement problem found later, Douyin E-commerce independently developed the "Fake Goods Prevention and Control Panoramic View System", which conducted algorithmic retrieval of the "content-live broadcast-commodity" of the whole platform of Douyin E-commerce and actively intercepted suspected infringing goods.
The active interception of infringement through technical means can improve the overall operating environment of the platform, protect the rights and interests of creators, and improve the user experience of the content platform.
According to the report, the success rate of actively identifying fakes has exceeded 80%, more than 230,000 infringing links have been deleted throughout the year, more than 30,000 infringing acts have been punished, and more than 10,000 infringing stores have been blocked.
In addition, for the protection of intellectual property rights, Douyin E-commerce has also set up an anti-counterfeiting laboratory, and has reached cooperation with 5 institutions such as CcPC and more than 200 domestic and foreign brands and associations such as Xiaomi, ANTA, Apple, Adidas, Nike, etc., and invested 6 million yuan in special funds throughout the year to purchase and identify experimental samples.
At the same time, a public review mechanism was established, which received more than 2,000 effective feedback from consumers, helped identify and punish more than 10,000 infringing goods and more than 650 infringing stores, and protected the intellectual property rights of more than 300 brands.
While preventing governance, Douyin E-commerce has also launched relevant educational videos and live lessons to enhance the awareness of merchants and celebrities on intellectual property protection.
In addition to building an intellectual property protection system through independent rights protection platforms, automatic detection of algorithms and manual testing, Douyin E-commerce has also established four major systems of "intelligence- research and judgment - depository - crackdown", actively pushing clues to public security organs and actively cracking down on the production and sale of counterfeits from the source.
For more than a year, the effectiveness of Douyin e-commerce in intellectual property protection has been very remarkable, taking the books that most intuitively reflect intellectual property protection as an example:
According to the report, Douyin E-commerce, the Beijing Fifteenth Society Anti-Piracy Alliance and the Children's Publishing Anti-Piracy Alliance jointly launched an anti-piracy initiative, which received a common response from more than 70 publishing houses and cultural institutions. Driven by the "National Good Book Project" launched by Douyin e-commerce, the sales of genuine books increased by 312% year-on-year.
Of course, to strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights, in addition to the prevention and control management of the platform and related organs, it is more important to enhance the public's awareness of intellectual property protection through publicity, which is also the unique advantage of Douyin e-commerce compared with other e-commerce platforms.
Based on the attributes of the content platform, Douyin E-commerce launched the anti-counterfeiting series column "Anti-counterfeiting Dou Knows", which provides consumers with knowledge related to authenticity identification and enhances their awareness of intellectual property protection through real and interesting content.
The State Intellectual Property Office and public security, courts, market supervision and management bureaus in many places have also opened official accounts on Douyin to educate and publicize the protection of intellectual property to the public.
It has to be said that under the rapid growth of Douyin e-commerce, the phased results of intellectual property protection are not easy.
Although from the perspective of the current situation of the industry and the innovative business model, the difficulty of Douyin e-commerce in intellectual property protection is relatively large, but there is determination and willingness to continue to invest, I believe that it can achieve the "quality GMV" expected by Douyin e-commerce.
Intellectual property protection requires the joint participation and creation of market supervision departments, brands, platforms and users, hoping that the report of Douyin e-commerce can provide valuable reference and reference for the industry, and also look forward to the joint efforts of Douyin e-commerce and the industry to make the e-commerce industry a gathering place for model innovation, product innovation and service innovation.