On August 15, 2023, the incident of "his own photos were sued by Visual China for infringement" appeared on Weibo's hot search, the matter was too dramatic, Visual China actually claimed the right owner, and the always strong and tough legal counsel had to hide and try to strive for reconciliation.
A few days later, the performance art of "all officials and bloggers collectively complaining that their LOGO pictures are copyrighted as visual China" was staged again, and China's National Astronomical Official Bo, China Exploration Association, CCTV celebrity Bai Yansong, etc. came down to "crusade" visual China.
Phoenix Network "Eye of the Storm" found that the two core companies in this dispute, Visual China and Getty Images, are related to the Getty Family, a famous American oil family behind it.
Visual China not only gave itself the Getty image, but also acted more and more like the previous Getty image.
1. Visual China's "regurgitation"
In the field of patents, there is a term called "copyright troll".
"Copyright trolls" silently hide in the early stage, allow infringement, neither try to contact the other party for authorization, nor give pre-litigation warnings, but wait for the "infringing" content to accumulate a certain amount, and directly seek compensation from the other party.
This model is popular, and it is the battle-hardened "copyright warriors" who have seen the other party's hole cards and made a deliberate choice: due to the time-consuming litigation and some commercial, reputational and other factors, many enterprises or natural persons are pressured to settle. Seeking a claim settlement after the fact tends to be cheaper and more profitable than pre-authorizing, an almost tried-and-true approach.
But this time, Visual China misread the opponent's hole card and kicked it on the hard rock.
According to the consistent practice, Visual China neither contacted the other party to ask for authorization nor pre-litigation warning, but accumulated 173 so-called infringing pictures of photographer Dai Jianfeng and directly sent an email to the other party, demanding that the other party either compensate more than 80,000 yuan, or cooperate for one year, and the cooperation cost is more than 50,000 yuan.
The two solutions are: first, Dai Jianfeng needs to purchase no less than 173 pictures, the unit price of the pictures is 300 yuan, the cooperation period is 1 year, in addition to the photos already used, you can download 173 pictures; The second is that the 173 pictures that have been used pay the full usage fee, and the unit price of the pictures is 500 yuan.
Visual China did not expect that the other party, as an original photographer, did not play according to the rules of Visual China, but directly threw out Wang Fried and directly exposed.
This bizarre rights protection caused the company's stock price to fall for five consecutive trading days, and its market value once lost more than 1.7 billion yuan.
The most dramatic part of the matter is that the two parties have contact information with each other, but if Visual China takes the initiative to communicate with the other party about the authorization before the claim, instead of directly claiming the claim, it will not be so seriously backlashed.
2. Suspected blackmail business model
As early as July 2018, Zhang Ying, founding managing partner of Matrix Partners China, questioned Visual China's "blackmail" business model, saying on Weibo that Visual China demanded hundreds of thousands of yuan in huge compensation and blackmailed companies into signing annual contracts. He believes that from the perspective of the company's revenue, it is said to be "very successful". "Infringement really shouldn't be, but this sky-high asking business model shouldn't be, and now it has become the company's core business model." I don't believe that such a blackmail business model can continue and maintain, wait, someday. ”
In 2019, Visual China was punished by the regulatory authorities for suspending business for rectification by the "public anger" caused by the inclusion of black hole photos, national flags and national emblems and trademarks of major enterprises in the gallery fee. According to the relevant copyright owner, Visual China has never obtained the copyright transfer of the copyright of the copyright owner, and has never even contacted the other copyright owner.
Shanghai Securities News once quoted Visual China insiders as saying that in terms of business model, Visual China does not pursue direct judgment compensation, mainly in order to turn rights protection into sales, and turn defendants into exclusive contract customers, that is, "rights protection to obtain customers, rights protection to generate income".
Leiteng Law Firm, which once had an honorary lawsuit with Visual China, pointed out directly on its official website that Visual China had "disguised a fabricated chain of litigation evidence." In response to the law firm's report, Visual China sued Leiteng Law Firm for "infringement of reputation", but in 2022, the court ruled against Visual China.
According to the article published by Leiteng Law Firm, the "Copyright Confirmation and Authorization Letter" issued by Getty Inc. in the United States should have the right to "display, market and use rights (including copyright use rights) license", but Visual China translated it as "all images enjoy copyright", Leiteng Law Firm stated that "there is a fundamental difference between the sub-licensing of copyright use rights and the direct authorization of the copyright owner, and in the case of sub-licensing, the licensee has no right to file a claim lawsuit".
The article also said that "Visual China's model of using the Copyright Confirmation and Authorization Letter for claim business has not changed", and pointed out that "not only Visual China has not corrected, but new image sales companies have emerged and begun to copy Visual China's rights protection model, that is, taking the authorization of overseas photo sales companies to fight counterfeits everywhere for profit." ”
Visual China has since repeatedly explained that it is not this business model.
However, Tianyan data shows that since 2009, Visual (China) Culture Development Co., Ltd. has been involved in 135 legal proceedings, its two subsidiaries Hanhua Yimei has been involved in 4,011 legal proceedings, Huagai Creative has been involved in more than 8,000 legal proceedings, and the three companies have been involved in more than 12,000 dispute cases, most of which are Visual China suing others for infringement of their works.
Several media reports have mentioned a set of data, "Since 2013, Vision China and its subsidiaries have been involved in more than 1,000 lawsuits, with an average of one lawsuit every two days, with a total amount of compensation of 6.25 million yuan; Among them, the amount involved in the copyright picture of Getty reached 6.15 million yuan, more than 98% of the total compensation mentioned above. ”
In other words, it's not Visual China that benefits the most from the claims lawsuit, but from Getty Imagery.
3. The Getty family behind Visual China
In 1995, Mark Getty, who came from the family of the famous American oil tycoon Getty, founded Getty Investment Holdings in London, which kicked off the investment and mergers and acquisitions of the global image copyright industry.
In 1997, Mark Getty merged Getty Investments with PhotoDisc, a digital image publisher in Seattle, to form Getty Images, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In the years since, Getty Images has acquired Fabulous Footage, Worldview, Profilephoto Library, and CD-ROM production companies Photodisc and Allsprot, and in 1999, Mark Getty acquired Kodak's comprehensive image library, The Image Bank, which also includes the China Travel Photo Library. Began to enter the Chinese photo market.
While Getty Images was buying and buying around the world, Visual China's predecessor, Photocome, happened to be established, but the financing problem had not yet been solved.
In 2000, when Chai Jijun was still working at China Youth Daily, he and Li Xueling, the founder of YY Live, and Chen Zhihua, a full-time technician, built a website for photographers to upload images and trade.
In order to raise money, they found Lei Jun and were rejected; Chai Jijun used his relationship to find Chen Tong, the editor-in-chief of Sina.com at that time, Chen did not invest money but gave resources, and it was the cooperation with Sina that allowed Tulai.com to get through the difficulties. In 2002, Sina offered to buy Tulai.com for 6 million yuan, but was rejected.
Coincidentally, in May 2002, Bailian Youli (Beijing) Investment Co., Ltd. (UIG Group) was established, and UIG Group invested in Tulai shortly after its establishment.
Li Xueling reduced his stake by 10% and sold it to investors, first to Sohu and then to NetEase. In 2005, Li Xueling left NetEase to found Dog and Play (Happy Gathering Era), which was later sold to Xunlei, and Duo Play became the later YY Voice.
This year the gears of fate began to turn.
UIG Group is the fate of Getty Images and Tulai.com.
Figure | Historical shareholder mirror image of Huagai Creative
In this year, UIG Group's capital actions were frequent, and Getty Images, which was being acquired globally, and theoretical competitor Tulai.com established a joint venture company, Huagai Creative, with UIG Group as an investor; Chai Jijun, who is still working for China Youth Daily, resigned; The original company of Tulai.com, Beijing Baiwangtu Technology Co., Ltd., changed its name to Hanhua Yimei, and after the name change, Hanhua Yimei began to enter the commercial market, and then obtained investment from UIG Group.
In 2008, Mark Getty sold Getty Images to private equity firms Herman and Friedman for $2.4 billion, and in the same year, Tulai.com quickly wrote off after completing the handover mission.
In 2011, UIG Group integrated and reorganized its subsidiaries Hanhua Yimei, Huagai Creative and Visual China, and in 2012, it acquired Dongxing Entertainment, China's largest entertainment material supplier, and further established Visual China Group.
In 2012, private equity firm The Carlyle Group successfully acquired Getty Images from H&F for $3.3 billion.
Carlyle took out a loan of $2.6 billion for the acquisition, which became a debt that Getty would have to take on when he joined the new company. In the years that followed, Getty spent a significant portion of his revenue paying off debt and paying dividends to private investors.
In 2014, Vision China landed on the A-share market through backdoor Far East shares. Liao Jie, the current chairman of Visual China, took over the control of Visual China from his parents Wu Yurui and Liao Daoxun and then generated electricity for love, Tianyan inspection data shows that during Liao Jie's 10-year term, the salary and number of shares are displayed as 0 yuan.
However, his parents carried out multiple rounds of reductions, and the announcement information shows that in March, September, November and December 2022, the company's then controlling shareholders and actual controllers Liao Daoxun, Wu Yurui, Liang Jun, Chai Jijun and others reduced their holdings by a total of about 33.3998 million shares. Even if roughly calculated at the lowest price in the secondary market on the day of the reduction, the actual controller has cashed out more than 500 million yuan so far last year.
Getty Images and Visual China never seem to have had trust issues, and the assets acquired by Visual China and the funds claimed by Visual China were almost all surrendered to Getty Images.
In 2016, Visual China acquired Corbis, owned by Microsoft, the biggest competitor of Getty Images, and then Visual China licensed all of Corbis' gallery to partner Getty Images.
Getty Image CEO Jonathan Klein publicly stated at the time: "After waiting 21 years, I finally got Corbis." How wonderful, we got milk, cream, cheese, yogurt and beef without having to buy cows. ”
In 2018, Getty Images' founder, Getty, announced that it would buy back all of Getty Images' controlling stake from Carlyle Group, a global asset manager.
In the same year, Visual China announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary acquired 100% of the shares of 500PX in the United States, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as "500px"), 500px's Marketplace (500px's direct sales platform) was completely closed, and business partner Getty Image fully controlled the international sales rights of 500px and took nearly half of the share; Corbis' upstream and downstream resources were cut off, the website was shut down, and the contracted photographers were dismissed and transferred to the Getty camp.
After years of capital operation, Getty Image has become the biggest beneficiary, eating almost all competitors, becoming the world's largest commercial image library, and also becoming a partner of Visual China and the only agency in China.
In the past, Visual China's market value evaporated by 1.7 billion, but Visual China and Getty Images' hunting for customers continues.
This article is from Phoenix Technology