On March 4, CCTV's "Today's Statement" focused on film and television copyright protection and exposed the destructive impact of piracy on the film and television industry. Shi Wenxia, deputy secretary-general of the China Film Copyright Association, said in the program that the rampant piracy will cause consumer diversion, which will have a serious impact on movie box office, video platform membership subscriptions, and derivative product sales, and will destroy the healthy development of the film and television industry from the source and harm content creation.
Currently, the problem of piracy and infringement has become one of the important factors restricting the development of the film and television industry. According to industry insiders, within minutes of the broadcast of popular dramas such as "The Long Season", "Joy of Life 2", "Hard to Woo", and "Waterside Past", the platform discovered and obtained a large number of infringing shares from major network disks through public channels on the Internet, and the clarity is no different from the genuine video. Some popular works have been online for less than a month, and a total of more than 100,000 infringing links have been found, of which more than 70,000 are infringing on network disks.
"For producers, if they fail to achieve the expected economic benefits due to piracy, the final capital recovery will also be a problem. In the long run, it will also seriously undermine their confidence in continuing to create." Shi Wenxia believes that infringement and piracy will have a huge impact on producers, distributors and screening organizations.
Screenshot of CCTV's "Today's Statement"
The harm of copyright infringement is also reflected at a deeper level. It is understood that pirated small websites (search engines), pirated resources on online disks, etc., have become an important profit model in the field of piracy by promoting and diverting traffic to overseas gambling, pornography, and even fraud crimes through subtitles and screen insertions. Industry insiders revealed that this not only weakens the public's awareness of copyright protection, but also provides "infiltration channels" for overseas programs, seriously endangering the country's ideological and cultural security. In particular, the spread of harmful information such as "pornography, gambling, and drugs" has a bad impact on minors who "live on the Internet" and lack discernment.
During this year's Spring Festival, the National Copyright Administration, together with the National Film Administration, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and other departments, launched a special campaign to protect the copyright of Spring Festival cinema films. Law enforcement departments promoted Internet platforms to deal with 190,300 infringing links involving Spring Festival cinema films, actively filtered, intercepted and deleted 2.1054 million pirated links, and banned and restricted the broadcast of 4,116 accounts that repeatedly infringed.
As a core component of the cultural industry, the film and television industry is not only an important support for the strategy of building a strong cultural country, but also an important bridge for Chinese culture to go global. In recent years, China's film and television industry has flourished. Take the phenomenal movie "Nezha: The Devil Boy Conquers the Dragon King" in the 2025 Spring Festival as an example. As of March 1, the film not only earned more than 14 billion yuan in box office in China, but also achieved impressive results and reputation in overseas markets. "Nezha: The Devil Boy Conquers the Dragon King" also encountered the problem of "still being shown in theaters, but being broadcast on the Internet." According to 10 typical cases in the "Special Action for Copyright Protection of Cinema Films during the Spring Festival" reported by CCTV News in March this year, 6 of them involved piracy and illegal broadcasting of "Nezha: The Devil Boy Conquers the Dragon King", and some of the cases involved amounts of more than 10 million yuan.
"Nezha: The Devil Boy Conquers the Dragon King" was secretly filmed and uploaded to the Internet
With the continuous emergence of new technologies, the forms and channels of piracy are becoming more and more diverse, making it difficult to guard against them. Among them, search engines, online disks, and short video platforms have become the hardest hit areas for infringement. A large number of pirated resources will quickly appear on search engines and online disks within only 3 minutes after a popular film or TV work is launched, and users can easily obtain them. There are even e-commerce platforms that openly sell high-definition online disk resources. In particular, search engines give priority to presenting links to pirated websites and providing convenient diversion for online disks, short videos with "super-long commentary" directly using the original film screen, and slices of "follow-up broadcasts" and other piracy phenomena are rampant. According to iQiyi statistics, its popular criminal investigation drama "I'm a Criminal Police" was launched only 13 days ago, and more than 82,000 online disk pirated copies were found. These piracy behaviors bring great difficulties and challenges to copyright protection.
Youku introduced that according to informed sources, compared with the music copyright, which is effectively protected through strong government supervision and copyright collective management, the film and television industry lacks unified administrative means of comprehensive governance and active governance of the platform. Faced with massive piracy, the rights holders are trapped in a repeated cycle of "complaint-offline-complain again-offline again", playing the "whack-a-mole" game every day, unable to effectively curb the spread of infringing content. In the end, they were forced to give up accountability due to the high cost of rights protection, resulting in the infringers being unscrupulous. According to the "2024 China Aggregation Industry Annual Development Report", the economic losses caused by the piracy of film and television works to video platforms have exceeded 20 billion yuan.
In recent years, relevant laws and regulations in the field of film and television copyright have become increasingly sound, and the crackdown has been further strengthened. The National Copyright Administration, the National Film Administration, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and other relevant departments have jointly deployed special work on the protection of cinema film copyrights on many occasions. The protection of cinema film copyrights focuses on three key links: pre-emptive prevention, in-process supervision, and post-event disposal. By strengthening early warning protection of key works, actively carrying out publicity and guidance, increasing online and offline monitoring and supervision, and investigating and handling cases of illegal recording and dissemination of cinema films in accordance with the law, especially focusing on the investigation and handling of illegal acts such as inducing and instigating minors to secretly film and record, and disseminating infringing and piracy on the Internet, the protection of the entire chain of cinema film copyrights will be strengthened, and a good copyright order in the film market will be further maintained. Severely crack down on the illegal recording and dissemination of cinema films to escort genuine cinema films.