Zheng Yuanjie is one of the most famous contemporary children's literature writers in China, selling more than 300 million copies of his works, creating literary characters loved by readers such as Pipiru, Rusisi, Shuk, and Beta, and accompanying generations of children and teenagers. However, it is such a "fairy tale king" with an international reputation, but he has encountered endless difficulties and setbacks in trademark rights protection. On April 18, Zheng Yuanjie issued a farewell letter, announcing that she would stop protecting trademark rights and never publish new works. This news has aroused widespread attention and heated discussion from all walks of life, many people feel sorry and unfair for him, and some people cheer for and support him, Zheng Yuanjie's rights protection incident has typical significance for the intellectual property protection of IP and its derivatives in the cultural field, and the whole society should re-examine the current situation and problems of copyright protection of writers.
As early as 2011, 50 writers including Jia Pingyu and Han Han publicly released "Chinese Writers Condemn Baidu Book", accusing Baidu Wenku of "stealing our works, stealing our rights, and stealing our property". They said Baidu Wenku uploaded its work without the author's authorization and profited from advertising revenue. They demanded that Baidu Wenku immediately remove all unauthorized works, and compensate for damages and apologize.
In recent years, with the strong demand for literary IP from all aspects of society, the protection of writers' rights has long been not limited to the issue of trademark infringement, but also has many challenges such as film and television adaptations and online piracy. In addition to literary works, the names of some well-known film and television works have also been maliciously registered as trademarks for various goods and services, such as "In the Mood for Love", "The Big Bang Theory", "Game of Thrones", etc., while some online writers' works are copied and disseminated by pirated websites, causing huge economic losses and blows to creative motivation.
So what is the difficulty in defending the rights of writers?
First, laws and regulations are not perfect and not in place. At present, the trademark administration in the mainland is a registration examination system, and it is difficult for unregistered trademarks to be well protected. Registered trademarks also have legal time limits and class restrictions, and once the time limit is exceeded or different classes are involved, it will be difficult to protect rights. In addition, the punishment for trademark infringement is not enough, the cost of violation is low, and it is not enough to deter infringers, and if the original author wants to cancel these infringing trademarks, he needs to provide a large amount of evidence to prove that he is a prior user or enjoys a high reputation, and go through a long and complicated administrative or judicial process, which consumes a lot of time, energy and money. Zheng Yuanjie once said that in the 21 years of trademark rights protection, he only successfully cancelled 37 infringing trademarks, each of which took an average of 6 years, the longest one took 19 years, and there are still 673 infringing trademarks that have not been successfully cancelled, such a high cost of rights protection undoubtedly sets a very high threshold and obstacle for the original author's rights protection.
The second is the lack of awareness and responsibility of the public. Some search engines, application markets, advertising alliances and other platforms have not fulfilled their main responsibilities and effectively filtered and blocked infringing content. At the same time, some consumers do not have the awareness of respect for intellectual property rights, and turn a blind eye to pirated content or even consume it, thus contributing to the market share and profit margins of pirated content. Zheng Yuanjie has repeatedly exposed and boycotted some products infringing trademarks on Weibo, calling on consumers not to be deceived and to support genuine goods.
On the one hand, government departments should strengthen legislation and law enforcement, further improve intellectual property protection laws and regulations, severely crack down on malicious infringement and piracy, and increase the cost of violations, on the other hand, relevant platforms should strengthen self-discipline and supervision, enhance pirated content retrieval capabilities and copyright protection awareness, timely block pirated accounts/websites/content, at the same time, writers should improve their awareness of prevention and rights protection, Reasonably plan the structure of trademark registration, and promptly apply for invalidation or file a lawsuit. The most important thing is that the whole public should establish the concept of respecting intellectual property rights, refuse to read and disseminate pirated content, and support legitimate literary works.