Recently, the Beijing Higher People’s Court issued “
Guiding Opinions on Hearing Disputes over Online Copyright
,” which mandates two elements that must be present for an infringement by an internet service provider to occur. Usually infringements are related to search engines, data storage, hyperlinks, or peer-to-peer networking. The two necessary elements include: there must be wrongdoings, and third parties are being facilitated in the commission of a direct infringement online.
The most common types of wrongdoings, according to the Court’s guidance, include providing a homepage or major webpage that distributes movies, music, or any other media that are currently in release, playing or are currently on the air, and then failing to remove the infringing media from the homepage or major webpage within a reasonable period of time. Provisions also require that even when a service provider fails to provide a link to alleged infringing media, but the service provider can identify the location of the media in dispute, the service provider is required to remove the media or disable the link to it immediately. “With the increase in online the piracy of movies, music, and software, this new guidance on internet copyright infringement us an example of how China’s internet market, now the world’s largest, is heading in the right direction,” says Edward E. Lehman, Managing Director of Lehman, Lee & Xu.
Lehman, Lee & Xu is a prominent Chinese corporate law firm and trademark and patent agency with offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macau, and Mongolia. The firm has been recognized as one of the top trademark firms in China by several intellectual property magazines and is managed by Mr. Edward Lehman, a leading expert on corporate law with 20 years of practice experience in Mainland China.