Research On The Copyright Infringement Of The Video-Sharing Sites

When technology can be developed, the Copyright Law will have to face the challenges of technological development. With the development of Web2.0 technology, a large number of video-sharing sites emerged. During this process, video-sharing sites have a severe impact on the traditional film and television industry and greatly affect the audience's viewing habits and ways of thinking. While video-sharing sites were originally designed to take the UGC (Users Generate Contents) mode, but from the beginning there were a large number of popular TV dramas and movies uploaded to the site by some users. It makes the sites have a huge number of non-original videos and therefore brings the sites numerous lawsuits. Nowadays copyright issues become a major obstacle to their development. This Paper focuses on the copyright infringement issues of video-sharing sites, divided into four chapters to discuss the issues.Chapter one points out that Copyright has become a bottleneck in the development of video-sharing site. Section one firstly introduces the emergence, development and characteristics of video-sharing sites. Section two uses data to indicate that video-sharing sites frequently has been sued because of copyright issues in recent years. At the same time to ask questions:whether the court's decision was lawful and reasonable; whether the existing regulations were perfect; whether we can keep balance between the progress in network technology and copyright protection. How the video-sharing sites deal with a huge number of copyright lawsuits. Chapter two firstly illustrates the definitions and the elements of the direct infringement and indirect infringement of copyright. Secondly discusses the contributory infringement and the vicarious liability which constitute the indirect liability based on the classical cases of American Copyright Law. Finally in order to put clear of the connotation and denotation of the indirect liability theory, this chapter focuses on the comparison of the relevant concepts with China's Civil Law and points out that there are many obstacles to apply the contributory infringement of traditional Tort Law to solve the liabilities of ISP. And vicarious liability is not the same as the special liability in our civil law.Chapter three discusses the "Chinese Experience" on identifying the copyright infringement of the video-sharing sites by summarizing the court's decisions of the video-sharing sites copyright infringement cases in recent years. This chapter has two sections. Section one illustrates how the courts identify the direct infringement and indirect infringement of video-sharing sites. Section two discusses the identification of tort liability of video-sharing sites by applying the Safe Harbor Rule. This section focuses on three core issues. One is whether the video-sharing sites change the videos which were uploaded by the users. The second is identifying the fault of video-sharing sites by applying the rules of "notice-take down procedure" and "duty of care ". The third is whether the video-sharing sites directly obtained the economic interests.Chapter four illustrates the solutions to copyright infringement issues of video-sharing sites. This chapter firstly indicates that we should apply the contributory infringement of Copyright Law to solve the liabilities of ISP instead of the contributory infringement of traditional Tort Law. And we should improve the provisions of vicarious liability in our law. Section two points out that the video-sharing sites should adjust its existing business model in order to obtain long-term development.This paper points out that applying the contributory infringement theory of traditional Tort Law to solve the copyright liabilities of video-sharing sites will have substantive and procedural problems. On the contrary, it is much more economical and effective that applying the contributory infringement theory of Copyright Law to solve this issues. Then the paper demonstrates the necessity and feasibility of establishing the indirect infringement system in our Copyright Law. At the same time, the paper focuses on the theme that how to identify the fault of video-sharing sites by using the rules of "notice—take down procedure" and "duty of care Because the "Regulation on the Protection of the Right to Network Dissemination of Information" did not completely refer to DMCA. The paper points out that the court should strictly identify the vicarious liability.