Lawsuit Called Opening Salvo in Chinese Media War

A lawsuit that has been filed by one of China's largest newspapers against one of the country's leading Internet portals over the issue of massive copyright violations is being described here as the opening salvo in a media war.

In the suit, which was filed in October and is expected to go to court soon, The Beijing News is seeking $400,000 in damages from a popular Internet site called Tom.com for having copied and republished more than 25,000 articles and photographs without authorization since 2003.

In recent years, China has acquired a reputation as a sort of no- man's land for intellectual property rights, with companies in virtually every industry freely copying designs and other content both from foreign companies and from domestic rivals with little fear of punishment.

The Beijing News lawsuit, however, comes at a time of accelerating legal reform efforts and signs of increased attempts by law enforcement agencies to protect copyrights and other forms of intellectual property. The suit also comes at a critical time for China's newspaper industry, which has experienced explosive growth in the past decade or so only to find itself confronted with an even faster growing rival in the form of new Internet-based media.

Now, as has happened in the United States and many other countries, with computer usage and broadband access both booming here, newspapers are losing readers — especially among young, prosperous city dwellers — to large corporate-owned Web sites. What set China apart from much of the rest of the world until recently was that these Web sites faced no legal obstacles in copying material from newspapers, often wholesale.

"There is a very brutal competition between newspapers, with seven or eight big ones just in Beijing, and now a big new player, the Internet, wants to wipe them all out, to change the landscape," said Yu Guofu, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property matters.

"The press is leading a hard life and facing an unpleasant future, but it has decided it is better to protect its rights than just sit and wait to die," Yu said.

According to one recent academic study, newspaper readership in China has declined sharply in the past three years, with the proportion of people who say they read a newspaper at least once a week falling to 22 percent from 26 percent since 2003.

A major presumed cause for the decline is that big Internet content providers, or portals, have become one-stop sources for all manner of information, from news and entertainment to blogs. Until recently, for most portals the general practice involved lifting news and other information directly from other sources, sometimes crediting the original source and sometimes not, but rarely paying for it.

In Europe, Google, the search engine company, is awaiting a ruling in a copyright dispute with Belgian newspaper publishers after the introduction of Google News Belgium.

The Beijing News lawsuit comes a little more than a year after a meeting of major newspaper publishers in Nanjing at which strategies were discussed to shore up the industry's base and combat the loss of content — and readers — to China's large Internet companies.

"In terms of the law, things are quite clear, that Tom's use of Beijing News's work without authorization clearly violates Beijing News's copyrights," said Yu Guoming, dean of the school of journalism at Renmin University in Beijing. "There are lots and lots of cases very similar to this one, but with this lawsuit, the traditional media is sending a very clear signal to the electronic media that their free lunch is over."

Representatives of The Beijing News declined to comment on the lawsuit. A spokesman for Tom.com, Tu Jianglu, denied the alleged violations.

"As a big company, we respect copyright and property rights," he said. "I can only say that there are other facts that make this more complicated."

Until recently, China's laws have generally been anything but clear on intellectual property issues. Moreover, they made it difficult to successfully sue over an alleged infringement.

Such an environment may have served the country's needs well earlier in China's industrial takeoff, amid a huge push to master new technologies. Absorption of foreign designs in particular was a priority as a means of catching up with the West.

The battle in the news media reflects part of a broader shift in the intellectual property landscape as China's growing place in world trade has brought strong new pressures to rein in wholesale piracy.

Many of the country's largest Internet companies, for example, are listed on foreign stock exchanges, making them liable for lawsuits filed abroad.

"We've signed agreements with over 1,000 traditional news organizations in China, which means that if we use their articles or reports, we definitely have reached prior agreement with them," said Zhang Xin, a spokeswoman for Sina.com, one of China's largest portals.

Very gradually, an awareness also seems to be taking hold that China's companies must build strong brands of their own to be successful, and that this cannot be accomplished in an environment where copying goes unpunished.

"To enhance the country's development we are trying to encourage innovation," said Xu Chao, vice director of the National Copyright Bureau.

"We are placing more emphasis on intellectual property and have made improvements in the law. It used to be possible for traditional media or Internet media to simply copy each other's work, but now this has been forbidden."