Music Copyright Society Of China

     "Music copyright infringement in the People's Republic of China is widely regarded as one of the highest in the world" [1]. "With a large amount of copyright infringement online during the past decade, China's supreme governing body, the State Council of the People's Republic of China, has introduced streamlined regulations, effective July 1, 2007 that clarifies China's copyright lawregarding the liability of content and service providers involved in the distribution of unauthorized content"[2]. However, industry observers note that "in many Asian territories, enforcing bodies are understaffed, under funded and have little experience tackling piracy" [3].

         

    As for China, although there exists pirated music CDs, most stores are selling repring version of music CDs instead of purely fake copies. However, recently, those stores in China become harder and harder to survive in the market,because more and more people including myself chose to download music fron internet. There are several major reasons:
    1. Online music always updateds faster than other ways, such as the original legal CDs or the illegal CDs.
    2. Not all the songs in the album are what we like; therefore, for people who like a hugh variety of music would choose to download them from internet.

                  
   
   

     The above two pictures are some situations in china about "Shanzhai". Aren't they look similar?   "Shanzhai" means two objects look really similar, but the original one can not sue the other one, because they are not exactly the same, but this situation does comfuse cosunmers.


     Nevertheless, music market in China is still strong, and musicians get respected and earned from their works too. First, musicians' fans will always support them even they can download, or, they had downloaded music from internet, and that is what  I always do,too. Second, legal  version of musical works now in China, acutally, we can say most part of Asia, are hard to be copied illegally, and the illegal versions usually do not sell well, becuase, recent musical works have more things than simply music in the album. For example, they might have some little gifts accompanied with the legal albums;thus, the attraction grows a lot.

    China is a complicated market, but, I believe that the market will get healthier and healthier.

   Following is a vedio about copycatting of cellphone (iPhone 4 from apple and china)

   




Citation:

 [1]: "Recording Industry steps up campaign against internet piracy in China". http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20080204.html.
 [2]: Tew, Chris (2006-12-19). "Chinese Government promises to help fight online piracy". Web TV Wire. http://www.webtvwire.com/chinese-government-promises-to-help-fight-online-piracy/.
 [3]: Music Copyright infringement in the People's Republic of China. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_copyright_infringement_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China#cite_note-4