China Uses Blockchain Technology to Shore up Copyright Protections for Digital Works

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Blockchain technology is being used in China for the purpose of securing protections on registered copyrights for digital works.

The Copyright Society of China (中国版权协会) (CSC) officially launched its new blockchain copyright services platform “China Copyright Chain” (中国版权链) on 1 June in Beijing, at the “China Internet Copyright Protection and Development Conference (中国网络版权保护与发展大会) held by the central government.

CSC said that China Copyright Chain provides a slew of services to holders of copyrights for digital works in China, including copyright evidence storage, infringement monitoring, online evidence collection, letter delisting, copyright mediation and litigation for rights protection.

“Blockchain possesses the unique features of inalterability, source tracing and distributed consensus,” said CSC director Yan Xiaohong (阎晓宏). “There is a natural fit with digital copyright protections, greatly reducing the cost of protecting copyrights and increasing protection efficiencies.

“At the same time [the blockchain] also provides a path for registering, trading and maintaining online copyrights.”

Qin Yuanming (秦元明), chief judge of the Intellectual Property Rights Panel of China’s Supreme People’s Court, said that the Chinese judicial system already actively makes use of blockchain solutions, with the Internet courts of Beijing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou using the technology for the processing of evidence.

Liu Zhengcao (刘政操), Tencent’s head of audio-visual copyrights, said that blockchain technology facilitate the remote collection of evidence, permitting the creation of a real-time system for the collection of copyright-infringement evidence when applied in tandem with big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.