Cultura Voice

How do you know when a copyright has been infringed? For years, this wasn’t even a question people asked in China because it was so obvious. The guys on the corner with carts full of bootleg CDs and DVDs, the illegal BitTorrents and download sites – all of them were wantonly and flagrantly engaging in copyright infringement. Indeed, infringement was their business model. If they weren’t offering copies of copyrighted works, nobody would be interested. Slowly but surely, though, China’s enforcement of copyright infringement has improved – in large part because large Chinese companies like Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent now control the rights to a great deal of content and  their  business models are based on people not getting such content for free somewhere else. The BAT companies have turned to Chinese agencies and courts to enforce their rights, evidenced by a concomitant surge in copyright-related litigation. We wrote about this last year in Copyright Protection in C...

China’s popular video streaming service, iQiyi, has filed confidentially for US IPO according to IFR. Sources familiar with the plans said the company is looking to raise $1 billion by the end of Q1 or early Q2 of 2018. iQiyi has not commented on their plans for IPO. Rumors of iQiyi’s IPO have been circulating since the end of last year. In September, Bloomberg reported that iQiyi was taking its IPO to the US, which could value the video streaming service at over $8 billion. And in October 2017, IFR also reported that iQiyi had picked three banks—Bank of America, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs—to help manage the deal. iQiyi is a Netflix-like video streaming service currently controlled by search giant Baidu, who became the firm’s largest shareholder in 2012. In 2013, Baidu acquired PPS—another popular video streaming platform in China—for $370 million, merging the two video streaming services. After the merger, iQiyi began to expand into areas such as s...

Chinese video streaming platform Bilibili is on course for an IPO in New York that could raise at least $200 million, a source told Bloomberg. The eight-year-old site has become the nexus for young Chinese in love with the ACG culture of animation, comics, and games. In 2016, the top searched keyword on Baidu among China’s post-00s generation is “Bilibili”, followed by “Taobao.” Less than 10% of Bilibili’s 100 million active users are above 25, Chairman Chen Rui revealed in a speech last December. China’s ACG market, like the online video gaming with which it shares a large user overlap, is lucrative. In 2016, China had 270 million ACG users (in Chinese)—that’s one in five Chinese, according to iResearch estimates. In 2015, China’s ACG industry hit a market value of 100 billion RMB and growth is expected to continue, says Qianzhan Industry Institute. Brands from KFC,...