Authorities Overhaul Video Websites

SARFT (State Admin of Radio, Film & TV), China’s top broadcasting authority, announced in November 2009 it would strengthen the campaign of cracking down “unlicensed” video websites. In an official statement, the authority said the campaign is aimed at providing a healthy environment for the country’s 200 million online video consumers, by eradicating “lewd, obscene and violent content” that had “severely undermined” the health of the country’s children. Besides these reasons, another key factor cited by SARFT was for copyright concerns, as the authority said most of the video websites have copyright infringement problems.

In this latest Internet clean-up campaign, most of the popular video sharing websites in China were either shut down or requested with “self-disciplinary measures”. Some of such websites have posted a notice in their homepage, saying the shutdown was due to the absence of relevant licenses. There are some BitTorrent (BT) websites left available for visit, but all have been asked to delete links to unlicensed TV programs and movies by February next year. Under this latest round of clean-up, foreign BT websites became widely inaccessible. Verycd.com, the most popular portal for eDonkey, was also shut down for a few days.

According to latest reports in the official Xinhua News Agency, as of late November, over 530 websites providing audio-visual service were closed, including the largest BT websites. Cao Yunxia, an official from SARFT said in an interview with the media that "websites providing illegal audio-visual program services undermine the industry and the whole industry chain, and SARFT will take consistent measures to investigate and close those violative websites". According to Cao, regulatory focus in the future will be on two areas: first, a permit is a must for all the entities engaging in Internet audio-visual services, and second, the self-discipline awareness must be strengthened within the industry, encouraging wholesome audio-visual programs and anti-piracy actions. Cao said the government will further escalate the regulation over Internet audio-visual services.

USITO Notes: As covered in December 4 USITO weekly newsletter, the MIIT, another Chinese Internet authority (China has a number of Internet authorities, exact number not available), has begun the clean-up campaign of “mobile Internet” since October. All those “campaigns” are part of China’s escalated control measures over Internet. We would like to express the appreciation of any efforts to clamping down the copyright infringing websites, and view it as a significant progress in China's IPR protection campaign.

The ICT industries are also concerned about the trade impact. As always we never tend to discuss complicated political issues that may be involved, but from the trade perspective this kind of Internet control will likely impact the bilateral businesses at a gradual basis. On the other hand, the free flow of information is further restricted which would in turn hinder China’s “innovation” drive. Besides the stories reported above, we also learnt that Chinese authorities just ruled that since Dec.14 Chinese Internet users will not be allowed to register individual domain names; and existing personal websites must be reviewed by ISPs for "harmful" contents. From now on, only individuals with a business license will be permitted to register a domain name. It is estimated this move would close half of Chinese websites.