I. Does the studio sing certain infringement?

Songwriters enjoy Copyrights protected by the Copyright Law, but most ordinary Internet users have little legal risk in opening livestream singing studios. As long as there are no rewards, no commercial advertisements, and no authorization is required, only the names of songs and songwriters are required. According to Article 24 of the Copyright Law, a published work shall be performed free of charge without charging the public or paying remuneration to the performer, and the performance shall not be for the purpose of making profits, and the copyright owner may not be licensed or paid remuneration, but the name of the author and the title of the work shall be specified... This regulation is called fair use, and the legislative purpose is to balance the interests of copyright and the public.

Although some experts believe that free live performance constitutes fair use and online performance does not, the author believes that the provisions of the law are clear, and there is no distinction between online performance and live performance. Even if the right holder sues, the court may not support it. Therefore, ordinary netizens' free performance constitutes little realistic risk of infringement. But PDD live is different, as a popular game "hero alliance" of the anchor head, his live although there is no charge to the audience, but accept the exceptional, and his studio very profitable, millions of dollars per month of fans to watch, so singing in the studio should be regarded as a profit-making behavior, not included in rational use.

II. Anchorman makes a million a month singing infringement more than 100,000?

At first glance, this problem is not a problem, the monthly flow of millions of direct broadcast, singing infringement song is not very normal? But in my experience, if the court decides, it won't pay that much. There are three main bases of tort compensation in Chinese courts: 1. Loss of the right holder; 2. Profits of infringers; 3, if there is no data in the first two terms, the court discretionary.

Holder to prove their loss in this case, to take out the prior authorization of the contract, according to the author, the right holder of foreign authorization are authorized by batch, such as for the Internet platform, are hundreds of thousands of song library, general per song dozens of yuan to hundreds of yuan for authorization, platform after authorized, is also the whole platform all anchors can, A song of lyrics and songs authorized more than ten thousand yuan, mostly for commercial advertising. Therefore, in this case, it is difficult for the right holder to prove that he suffered a large loss due to the infringement of a single song.

In terms of profit, if the right holder in this case claims that PDD's live broadcast stream is directly regarded as his profit from infringement, it is very unlikely for the court to support it. It is difficult for the rights holder's lawyers to prove a causal link between streaming water and PDD singing. The main reason why PDD can get high rewards in the live broadcast room is his live game behavior as the head anchor of the head game league of Legends. As for singing, it is only a pleasant behavior in the leisure of live broadcast. The rewards during singing can be the most profitable, but can not be identified as the main reason for other rewards.

Therefore, this case is more likely to be determined by the court. For copyright infringement of songs and songs, the court's compensation is generally divided into two parts: 1. 2, rights protection notary fees, attorney fees and other reasonable expenses. Single lyrics and songs in various courts of the compensation standard difference is quite big. Previously, the music Association sued Douyu for 42,600 yuan for feng Timmer, douyu's first sister, who sang part of the song "Lover's Heart" during a live broadcast. In the end, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court awarded only 5,200 yuan (2,000 yuan loss and 3,200 yuan reasonable expenditure). And shenzhen Qianhai court in the case of Tencent v. Byte, a number of cases of a single song awarded more than 10,000 yuan.

PDD of the case, although there is a live broadcast of exceptional high factor, but the host obviously does not belong to malicious infringement, and have to apologize, so if he is a Beijing court found, may not exceed ten thousand yuan, even PanPei standard higher court to review the shenzhen sea before (premise is the right holder can find the link under the jurisdiction of the court), found guilty of compensation should be in 3-50000 yuan between.

III. Difficulties for copyright owners

Needless to say, the claim of 100,000 yuan sued by the right holder in this case is on the high side, and it seems a little unkind not to withdraw the lawsuit when PDD has apologized and is willing to negotiate. However, as an intellectual property lawyer, I have represented multiple platforms and song copyright owners in the copyright game, or a little understanding of their difficulties. Their biggest problem: forensics are too hard.

To the court, the first to have evidence that live in the face of this new thing, the copyright person forensics cost a little high, oneself to record a screen is not evidence, take live infringement evidence to send someone to do notarization or timestamp, if there is a replay, studio can do later, but now a lot of studio playback, this can only be sent at a studio. But the problem is that there are millions of anchors on the live streaming platform, and they can sing millions of songs. The large copyright companies have the rights of hundreds of thousands of songs, while the small copyright companies may only have thousands of songs. So to obtain evidence live, there must be technical measures to monitor and human surveillance, but even so, copyright owners to wait for the infringement of their own works of the anchor is also looking for a needle in a haystack.

Finally, compared with a few years ago when the live streaming industry started, the copyright situation has improved greatly. Many live streaming platforms have begun to buy music copyright and have their own song on-demand system. If anchors choose to sing songs in the system, there is generally no risk of infringement. I hope that all platforms will continue to work hard to buy more copyright, so that anchors can sing their favorite songs without hindrance.