Digital Media in Asia Blog

A pair of companies taken to court for internet film piracy offered a unique defense, telling the court they are guilty but saying the owner of the movie they made available on the Internet was asking for too much compensation.

Digital TV broadcasts for mobile phones equipped with special receivers began in Japan’s major urban areas Saturday, following several months of test broadcasts.

Today’s talk with Peter Yu, sponsored by the Digital Media in Asia Project and Harvard Law School’s East Asia Legal Studies Program, will be webcast at 12:30.  Please vistit the Berkman Center homepage for more information and for a link to the webcast.  It’s in Real Audio format (unfortunately) so if you don’t have a Real Audio player you can download one here: www.real.com.

Celebrated Chinese film director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) has threatened to sue Hu Ge, a 31 year-old Shanghai audio engineer, with copyright infringement–because of a homemade spoof about steamed buns.  Hu was so disappointed with Chen’s latest film, The Promise, that he put together The Steamed Bun Murder, a 20-minute parody of the film, and posted it on the internet. Hu’s parody has become an overnight sensation in China, and something of a cause c�l�bre.

From The Times:

[Hu’s] satire, unprecedented in China’s carefully monitored media, has
attracted millions of viewers, almost certainly many more than paid to
see The Promise. The film has proved to be something of a box-office flop, although distributors say it has earned �15 million.

Chinese collapse in gales of laughter as they watch Mr Hu’s spoof. The Steamed Bun Murder
not only parodies the most expensive film made in China, but also pokes
fun at state television. He uses a poker-faced presenter and stuffy
communist terminology in his tongue-in-cheek report of the
investigation into the humble bun murder.

If Chen pursues a legal case it is unclear if Chinese courts would allow a parody fair-use defense. Such parodies are rarely produced or broadcast by the strictly controlled state-run traditional media, so these might be untested legal waters.

There is a developing trend of homemade spoofs gaining phenomenal popularity over the internet in China (e.g., the Back Dorm Boys, whose goofy dormroom webcam video of themselves performing Backstreet Boys tracks was such a sensation it landed them an advertising deal with Motorola). Clearly, Chinese consumers see the internet as a source of alternative content that’s in tune with the modern Chinese urban experience in a way that the conservative state-run media is not. Hu’s spoof is a salient example, taking direct shots at a state-run media perceived as stuffy.

This Thursday, March 2, we’re pleased to present a live and webcast event, co-hosted with the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School.  Professor Peter Yu will present “Elegant Offenses, Digital Opium and the Sinicyberspace.”  Lunchtime talks begin promptly at 12:30 p.m.  This talk is open to the public, and is located at Harvard Law School, Pound Hall 106. You are invited to bring your lunch beginning at 12 noon to meet the guest speaker and others in EALS and the Digital Media in Asia Project. We’ll supply fruit, cookies, and beverages.

We will post a link to the webcast on this blog shortly before the event.

From Professor Yu:

About Peter Yu:

Peter K. Yu (余家明) is Associate Professor of Law and the founding director of the nationally-ranked Intellectual Property & Communications Law Program at Michigan State University College of Law.  He holds appointments in the Asian Studies Center and the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University. He is also a research fellow of the Center for Studies of Intellectual Property Rights at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China and a member of the affiliated faculty of the Working Group on Property, Citizenship, and Social Entrepreneurism at Syracuse University College of Law.  Born and raised in Hong Kong, Professor Yu is a leading expert in international intellectual property and communications law.  He is the editor or coeditor of three books and currently is working on a book titled Paranoid Pirates and Schizophrenic Swashbucklers: Protecting Intellectual Property in Post-WTO China.  Professor Yu has spoken at events organized by the ITU, UNCTAD, WIPO and the U.S. government and at leading research institutions from around the world.  He is a frequent commentator in the national and international media, and his publications are available on his website at www.peteryu.com.

Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson led a thought-provoking session Wednesday night (2/8/06) about his vision–enticing but embryonic–of using technology, the Internet, and even soccer to connect what he calls the biggest of the big–China–with the smallest of the small–Jamaica. His love for Jamaica, and his track record of helping the people there and truly changing lives, gave the presentation an added richness, sincerity, and importance. He was looking for suggestions and ideas from the group as much as he was looking to present ideas himself. And it was a good group–about 25 people, many happy to engage in a discussion about how to further a unique vision that still needs the right spark.

Unfortunately we had some technical problems with the webcast (we’ll fix that before the next event in our Digital Media in Asia speaker series).

Click here for a recap of the session at the Berkman Center web site.

To participate in Nesson’s online dialog about a China-Jamaica connection, check out his wiki.

Legendary Harvard Law School professor and cyberlaw and evidence expert Charles Nesson will speak to the Digital Media in Asia Project on Wednesday, Feb. 8 from 5-7PM (US Eastern Standard Time) at Harvard Law School (Pound Hall rm. 107).

Professor Nesson will lead a discussion on how the internet, weblogs, and the media/entertainment/sports industries can be utilized to create international bridges between cultures. The focus will be on China and Jamaica. We will be joined by special guest Berkman Center for Internet & Society fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief and China/weblog expert. Refreshments will be provided.

Click here to listen to a live webcast of the event beginning at 5:00PM (EST). (For an http stream, click here.)

The rise of digital technologies and the Internet has made the current copyright regime antiquated, at best, and irrelevant at worst. For various reasons, the patent and copyright laws seem increasingly unworkable given business and social realities of today. What would (or will?) the world be like without copyright and patent rights?

That was the question posed to CEOs at a workshop of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. According to the Financial Times article covering the session, some among the breakout groups that tackled the question saw real advantages to industry and consumers in increased efficiency and increased “personalization of products” (not quite sure what that means). Regarding media in the digital age,

Companies could also aim to make money from context rather than content. A film company, for example, could generate income by providing a stimulating cinema experience rather than selling the film itself. But the film industry might also have to face some unpleasant truths.

“Since the time of the pharaohs the pyramids have not been built. We should expect the death of Titanic the movie. The idea of spending a quarter of a billion dollars on a film about a sinking ship” is no longer going to work, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance at Harvard and Oxford universities.

One has to wonder how many of these CEOs found it an interesting exercise for an hour, but consider it little more than that. Will they be so open to some of the ideas floated during the session when the realization hits, perhaps sooner than later, that copyright and patent laws in their present forms really are out of step with technological and social realities?

Seeking to tap into China’s market of some 350 million mobile phone subscribers, Seattle’s Melodeo has formed a joint venture with Access China, a subsidiary of Access, a Japanese internet technology provider. The joint venture “will launch the first platform in China to deliver secure digital content through wireless operators and other mobile-service providers.” According to its website, Melodeo provides “an all-in-one mobile music system … to Mobile Operators. This system lets users shop for music on their mobile phone, download it to the mobile phone and listen to it anywhere or any time in high quality stereo.”

The enormous number of Chinese mobile phone users is no doubt enticing to companies like Melodeo. A fair number of pundits think mobile phone downloads is the killer app that will turn things around for the piracy-riddled music industry in China. Of course, in China the potential users of a wireless, for-pay music download service are probably a relatively small subset of the 350 million mobile phone users. Couple that with the fact that the price Chinese consumers are willing to pay for per-song downloads is something far lower than the 99-cent US price-point, and it might be a challenging business model to sustain. Of course, the biggest challenge to the music-over-mobile business model is unauthorized P2P file sharing, which is rampant in China, and threatens the future of any for-profit online (or mobile phone-based) music retail business model.

Currently, 75% of households in South Korea have high-speed broadband access. New types of businesses, not really found in other countries, have developed as a result of the growth of the broadband market in South Korea. 

There are companies in Korea that provide “video on demand” online, often even with high-definition video, for less than Americans pay to rent a DVD.  Companies that provide online gaming as well as services like the Cyworld blogging site have penetrated all segments of society and become a national obsession.