Why has Visual China repeatedly caused "big storms"?

Image source: @VisualChina

Author|Mo Enmeng, Editor|Deep Sea

The photographer's own work was notified of infringement by others, and he was also claimed 80,000 yuan, which seemed to be laughing and crying happened to photographer Dai Jianfeng.

On August 15, photographer blogger Dai Jianfeng shared his outrageous experience on Weibo, which caused many netizens to watch, and the photographer made a claim against the photographer for a claim from Visual China, a well-known domestic Internet technology company with the production, dissemination and copyright trading of "visual content" as its core.

Radar Finance combed and found that this is not the first time that Visual China has had a similar controversy. As early as 2019, Visual China "appropriated" the copyright of black holes, national flags, national emblems and many company logo pictures, which caused criticism from the outside world.

In fact, Visual China, which landed on the capital market through backdoor borrowing in 2014, has been questioned by the outside world for its model of "litigation as a consignment". According to people familiar with the matter, Visual China has a special team responsible for handling "image infringement matters". Whether it is a small or medium-sized company or a large company, many companies have dealt with Visual China because of alleged infringement.

Some Internet observers pointed out that at a time when the concept of copyright is gradually popularized, Visual China is right to do copyright business, but the premise is that the works it claims copyright should be works in which it has relevant rights, rather than copyright assassins under the banner of copyright protection. If a company claiming copyright protection falsely claims rights, appropriates other people's rights for itself, and profits from them, it will one day be eaten back.

"The photos I took myself were infringed by myself"

According to photographer Dai Jianfeng, there are a total of 173 works allegedly infringing and taken by himself, but he has not cooperated with Visual China on these works, and he has never uploaded these works to Visual China's gallery, so he wonders how these works have become the copyright of Visual China, and even asks him to compensate for losses.

Radar Finance learned through the email documents posted by the photographer that based on the so-called "infringement", Visual China proposed two solutions to the photographer. First, photographers can purchase no less than 173 images from the Visual China Material Library website at a price of 300 yuan per piece, and the cooperation period is one year. After the signing of the cooperation agreement, the photographer can directly exempt the responsibility for the images previously used, and another 173 pictures can be selected from the Visual China material library website to download and use.

If there is no additional demand for images, Visual China also provides a second solution, which is to pay the full usage fee of 173 images at a price of 500 yuan per piece, so as to calculate the total amount of 86,500 yuan. After the payment is completed, Visual China will no longer claim any or claim any compensation against the photographer's affiliated company for the infringement involved in this settlement agreement.

After the incident was exposed, the related topics triggered a large number of netizens to participate in the discussion, and the topic of "the photos taken by himself was sued by Visual China for infringement" once rushed to the top of the Weibo hot search list. As of press time, the aforementioned topics have attracted more than 670 million views on Weibo, 26,000 discussions, and more than 610,000 interactions.

At about 10 p.m. on August 15, Visual China, which was on the cusp of public opinion for the storm, responded through its official Weibo. Visual China said that after preliminary verification, the images in question were sold by the photographer's authorized photo library Stocktrek Images, and Stocktrek Images licensed the relevant images to Getty Images for sale. As the exclusive partner of Getty Images in Chinese mainland, Visual China has complete sales rights including the pictures involved, and the sales authorization chain of the pictures involved is clear and complete. Visual China also said it would continue to communicate with photographers to properly handle misunderstandings.

Some netizens made a figurative analogy to the sales authorization chain in Visual China's response, with photographers as owners, Stocktrek Images as second hosts, Getty Images as third hosts, and Visual China as four hosts. In this way, the whole thing can be understood as the visual China as the fourth landlord is ready to collect rent from the real landlord.

However, the photographer did not accept Visual China's response, saying, "There is no misunderstanding here, up to now, you are still illegally selling my work online, lying to me and others that you own the copyright of your work and claiming compensation." Please stop your infringement now! ”

The photographer revealed that he had checked with Stocktrek, which clearly informed Visual China that it did not have the right to sell his work and did not have any copyright to his work. Getty also has no right to relicense its work.

Subsequently, Hualong called Stocktrek, which said that a representative of Visual China had called the company an hour ago, and the company also clearly notified that Dai Jianfeng's related works needed to be removed from the Visual China website. For the next step, the staff member told the media that the Getty platform will also contact Visual China to remove Dai Jianfeng's works.

At noon on August 17, the relevant person in charge of Visual China sent Nandu Media the content of the agreement between the company and Getty Images, proving that it legally owned the right to sell Dai Jianfeng's photographic works in the Chinese mainland. The relevant person in charge of Visual China also said, "Before we sent a letter to him (the photographer), we did not mean that we would directly sue him, but asked him to verify it himself." In this process, Visual China does have something to improve, and we will also do some reflection."

"The world has been bitter vision China for a long time"?

Radar Finance learned that Vision China was established in June 2000. In April 2014, Vision China landed on A-shares through a backdoor listing. In June of the same year, Visual China changed the company's main business from indoor theme parks, intelligent amusement facilities and special film and television production to visual content and services.

Although Visual China has responded to this matter, judging from the photographer's statement and the large amount of feedback on the Internet, the outside world does not seem to buy Visual China's response. Some netizens supported photographers to actively defend their rights, some netizens created the phrase "view as yourself" for this purpose, and some netizens ridiculed Visual China as the CNKI of the picture industry.

Or affected by this incident, Visual China's performance in the capital market has also been affected. As of the close of trading on August 16 and August 17, Visual China's share price fell by 4.86% and 3.9% respectively. In just two trading days, Visual China's market value has evaporated by more than 1 billion yuan, and its latest market value is 11.062 billion yuan.

It is worth mentioning that among the many comments on social platforms, more than one netizen pointed out that Visual China is not the first time that a similar situation has occurred. Radar Finance further combed and found that in fact, before being involved in this turmoil, Visual China had indeed caused controversy many times.

In April 2019, Visual China was embroiled in a copyright controversy. At that time, the first black hole photo in human history was on the Internet. However, the photo, published by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), was recently published on Visual China's website.

According to the copyright description of the European Southern Observatory website, as long as there is a clear signature, it can be distributed for free, but Visual China not only marked the photo with its own watermark, but also specially marked "This picture is an editorial picture, if it is used for commercial purposes, please call or consult a customer representative". For a time, the black hole photo copyright belongs to Visual China's spit voice spread on the Internet.

In addition to black holes, Visual China even "appropriates" the copyright of the national flag and national emblem. On the afternoon of April 11, 2019, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League posted two screenshots through its official Weibo account, which were screenshots of the National Flag and National Emblem of the People's Republic of China available on the Visual China website. The above screenshot shows the copyright notice printed with the words "Copyright: Visual China" and the consultation phone number for commercial use.

Under this Weibo of the Communist Youth League Central Committee, companies including Nanfu, Phoenix Technology, Suning.com, 360 Cleanup Master, Sina Games, Jianlibao, Kweichow Moutai, Meiling, Haier, etc. have spontaneously posted their own logo pictures printed with Visual China's copyright logo to express their doubts about Visual China's related behavior.

Regarding the copyright dispute related to the black hole, Visual China said that the black hole photo belongs to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and Visual China obtained the editing license through the partner. This image license is not exclusive, and other media and image agencies have also licensed it. However, according to the requirements of the copyright owner, the picture can only be used for news editing and communication, and cannot be used as a commercial category without permission.

Regarding the copyright turmoil related to the national flag and national emblem, Visual China said that the non-compliant pictures of the national flag, national emblem and other non-compliant pictures on the Visual China website reported by netizens were found to be provided by Visual China contracted contributors, and Visual China as the platform party bears the responsibility for lax review, for which I apologize! We have taken non-compliant images offline, and will continue to strengthen the review in accordance with relevant laws and regulations to avoid similar situations.

On April 12, 2019, in response to the situation of Visual China's website disseminating illegal and harmful information, the Tianjin Municipal Internet Information Office interviewed the person in charge of the website overnight in accordance with the law, and ordered the website to immediately stop the illegal behavior and make comprehensive and thorough rectification.

On April 18 of the same year, Visual China issued a statement promising to establish a copyright protection model in line with the Chinese market, respect the demands of stakeholders in the industry, jointly build a compliant, reasonable and reasonable product and service pricing and copyright protection workflow, and actively accept supervision.

However, judging from the turmoil that has recently sparked heated discussions on the whole network, Visual China's commitment to copyright has obviously not been fulfilled. When Visual China was accused of infringement due to the photographer's own photos, China's National Astronomical Official Bo also left a message in the comment area of the photographer's blogger, "We have also received similar calls, such as the official version of pictures released by NASA, the US space agency, are counted as their copyright."

Regarding the copyright dispute in Visual China, Xinhua News Agency once commented, "We respect copyright protection, but if we start a business under the guise of copyright protection, I am afraid it is not very reasonable." ”

The "sales by litigation" model raises questions

Behind the frequent involvement in copyright disputes, Visual China's business model has attracted widespread attention from the outside world.

According to Visual China's previously released financial reports, from 2020 to 2022, Visual China achieved revenue of 570 million yuan, 657 million yuan and 698 million yuan, respectively, and the growth rate slowed down. In terms of profit, Visual China's net profit attributable to the parent in the past three years was 141 million yuan, 153 million yuan and 99.18 million yuan respectively. Previously, from 2016 to 2019, Visual China's net profit attributable to the parent was at the level of more than 200 million yuan.

Breaking down Visual China's revenue shows that the vast majority of its revenue comes from visual content and services. Wind data shows that the proportion of visual content and services in Visual China's total revenue has been above 70% all year round, and the proportion has remained at a high level of more than 90% in the past three years.

However, many voices outside believe that Visual China's performance is inseparable from the contribution of its "sales-style rights protection" behavior. As early as July 2018, Zhang Ying, founder of Matrix Partners China, complained on Weibo that "Visual China began to develop a system last year to organize and widely search for various companies that used their images without authorization, and then demanded huge compensation." Usually a small negligence does not accept the deletion of a picture, directly demanding hundreds of thousands of yuan in sky-high compensation, and blackmailing the company to sign an annual contract. ”

The system Zhang Ying refers to the "Eagle Eye" system based on image big data and artificial intelligence technology specially developed by Visual China in order to collect and sort out infringements more conveniently and efficiently and reduce the cost of copyright protection.

It is reported that the system has functions including automatic network-wide crawling, automatic image comparison, etc., which can automatically process more than 2 million / day of data, can track the use of company-owned pictures on the network, and provide copyright protection services such as authorization management analysis and online infringement evidence preservation.

Vision China revealed in its 2017 annual report that the "Eagle Eye" system can track the use of company-owned pictures on the network, better target potential customers and meet their needs, achieve precision marketing, greatly reduce customer acquisition costs, and achieve a significant increase in the number of customers. In 2017, the number of potential customers identified through Hawkeye increased by more than 84% compared to the same period last year; The number of new annual agreement customers through Hawkeye increased by more than 54% compared to the same period last year.

The outside world's doubts about Visual China's "sales-style rights protection" are not groundless, and CCTV.com has also made a sharp comment on the title of "Severely Punish Visual China, Cut off the Cancer of the Intellectual Property Market": Visual China sells legal affairs with the face of "can help me", one hand infringes the legitimate rights and interests of the original owner, and on the other end "rights protection and blackmail" on the user. It has suffered both the original author and the user, so there is the phrase "bitter vision China for a long time" on the Internet.

In addition to the above, some media have also restored the whole process of visual China's "sales-style rights protection" for the public in relevant reports. The Beijing Evening News has reported that a well-known blogger has questioned Visual China's long-standing "gallery fishing" operation on Weibo: spreading a large number of pictures to various so-called free gallery networks and public networks, waiting for young designers of various companies to download and use these images, Visual China will regularly retrieve these images, "If it is a medium-sized company with income, it can be harvested in half a year; If it's a small company, then raise another two or three years to harvest. ”

In fact, in recent years, Visual China has frequently appealed to other companies or individuals on the grounds of infringement. Tianyan investigation shows that up to now, Visual (China) Culture Development Co., Ltd., the main operating company of Visual China, has been involved in as many as 181 judicial disputes, of which it acted as a plaintiff in as many as 143 cases, and disputes involving infringement of the right to transmit information on the network of works accounted for 130.

In addition, Hanhua Yimei (Tianjin) Image Technology Co., Ltd. and Huagai Creative (Beijing) Image Technology Co., Ltd., which belong to Visual China Group, have more than 10,000 judicial disputes. Tianyan investigation shows that most of the roles played by these two companies in relevant judicial disputes are plaintiffs, and the top number of cases is mostly disputes over infringement of the right of information network transmission of works, copyright ownership and infringement disputes.

According to the financial report released by Visual China, in 2022, as many as 72 arbitrations sued/applied for by Visual China and its subsidiaries, involving an amount of 23.0103 million yuan, some of which have been settled and some of which are not yet in the process. In the same year, Visual China's net profit attributable to the parent was 99.18 million yuan, which means that the amount of cases sued by Visual China in 2022 is equivalent to 23% of the company's net profit attributable to the parent in the same period.

Visual China also mentioned in its annual report that infringement in the image and video market is still relatively common. The company will continue to work closely with government authorities, industry associations, mediation institutions and judicial authorities to continuously improve the company's ability to monetize and protect copyright.

According to Shanghai Securities News, a person close to Visual China once revealed to him that the purpose of Visual China's lawsuit is not to pursue direct judgment compensation, but to turn rights protection into sales and turn defendants into exclusive contract customers. Vision China has also said that most clients will reach a settlement with them before the litigation judgment and become long-term cooperative customers, and the amount of the final effective judgment through court litigation does not exceed 0.1%.

Looking back at the controversies that Visual China has been involved in in recent years, People's Daily's previous comments on it are still applicable today. Whether it is forwarding black hole photos or spitting on Visual China, a social consensus should be formed: we respect copyright, which does not mean conniving at non-compliant business methods; We accuse flaws in the way we do business, let alone go to the other extreme and undermine the social consensus on the protection of intellectual property rights. In the era of copyright awareness, what people really care about is not paying for pictures, but being charged indiscriminately. Protecting copyright, in the final analysis, is to protect and encourage originality, keeping this original intention in mind, the market can grow.