Private Initiative Aims To Curb Chinese Piracy

by Mary Swire, for LawAndTax-News.com, Hong Kong

13 October 2005

85% of all music sold in China is pirated; music distribution platform R2G offers the music industry a solution by tracking down offending distributors and compelling them legally to stop or sign up to its licensing and monitoring platform.

R2G already has contracts with Universal Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music. The company uses Internet detection programs to track unlawful sites - currently it is suing 9sky.com and 21cn.com, both major download portals.

"There have been a number of instances where retailers--some of them major Web sites in China--have been warned about the existence of unlicensed content on their Web sites and they have promptly agreed to take it down," says Matthew Daniel, R2G's director of business development.

After losing a lawsuit in Beijing to a subsidiary of EMI last month, Baidu.com agreed to cut off thousands of unlicensed links, and it was followed recently by Internet portal Netease.com. R2G says it is in talks with Baidu to revamp its MP3 search service so that it produces links only to licensed music.

R2G has received the endorsement of various government bodies including the Copyright Society of China and the Copyright Protection Center of China (CPCC), and was invited to help draft new government regulations for copyright protection on the Internet. The new rules, implemented from June, state that service providers can be sued for copyright infringement, have their income from such activities confiscated and be fined up to 100,000 yuan.

R2G was founded by a team with relevant but diverse backgrounds in technology, music, film, legal and finance who have been at the forefront of the delivery of media and entertainment in China, and is led by Jun Wu, its President and CEO.

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