Online Copyright Infringement in China: Suing for Illegal Video Streaming

China’s legal framework provides robust protection for video copyrights, supporting IP rights-holders to take legal actions against unauthorised online dissemination of their works. From the perspective of Chinese law, this article aims to outline:

The unauthorised streaming of a film or television series in its entirely is a typical form of infringement. With the rise of short-form video platforms, there are also various methods of dissemination that may constitute copyright infringement under Chinese law, including:

Copyright owners have every right to seek remedies for damages suffered from an IP infringement. The Chinese court calculates and decides the monetary amount based on:

If the infringement is deemed malicious, IP rights-holders also have the right to claim punitive damages. In addition, IP rights-holders are entitled to claim the reasonable expenses incurred for ceasing the infringement, including reasonable legal fees.

Where it is difficult to calculate the actual losses suffered or the profits obtained, the Chinese court may now render a relief at its discretion of up to USD690,312, depending on the circumstances of the case. This current statutory relief is ten times what it was three years ago.

This significant incremental increase in relief happened following the amendment of the Copyright Law in 2020. Since then, there have been several judgments in which high-value relief has been rendered to video IP rights-holders. Although Chinese law is primarily based on codified statutes (as are other civil law countries), the judgments from precedent cases also guide subsequent outcomes to a certain extent – meaning high-value relief will be sought in similar cases in the future.

In a recent case heard by an intermediate Chinese court, the plaintiff – who holds IP rights on a very famous television series – sued a defendant who infringed plaintiff’s TV series by:

In this instance, both the plaintiff and the defendant are very influential production companies with a large number of daily active users in the field of video streaming. Even though the actual loss was not possible to calculate, the court exercised its discretion per the law and ruled that the defendant is liable to pay the plaintiff around USD4.41 million in compensation.

Based on standard practice in China, IP rights-holders need to take the following specific steps in order to bring a claim against the infringing party.

Given that the infringing videos are hosted under the infringer’s account and retained in the servers of online platforms that the infringer has control over and can access directly, they can be easily deleted by the infringer once the infringer receives notice of legal action by the copyright holder.

Typically, a better practice is therefore to preserve evidence before taking any legal action against the infringer. For this purpose, lawyers collaborate with a notary public to establish records of such infringing videos. These records will be used as the basis for a formal legal letter and submitted as evidence in the lawsuit thereafter.

A law formal legal letter should be sent by a law firm to the alleged infringer on behalf of the copyright holder. A notice will also be sent to the streaming platform with explicit demands to remove the infringing video. Where the alleged infringer operates using an alias instead of its legal name, the notice will also demand that the platform discloses the legal identity of the infringer.

Thanks to safe harbour rules, the steaming platform will not be held liable if it suspends the infringing account or deletes the infringing video after receiving the legal demand. However, the infringer will still be held liable for damages even if the infringing videos are deleted.

It might be more effective for the copyright holder to resolve the dispute by reaching a settlement with the infringing party. Therefore, some efforts should be made to negotiate a settlement before diving into a lawsuit. In the case of an established streaming account, the alleged infringer would usually choose to settle in order to save the account.

If a settlement cannot be reached, a lawsuit may be filed. The Chinese court of domicile of the defendant has jurisdiction, as does the court local to the web server containing infringing videos. Should the case involve multiple defendants, the lawsuit could be filed in the court of domicile of any one of the defendants. This provides some flexibility when choosing the most suitable jurisdiction for the lawsuit.

China’s legal framework provides significant protection for film and television copyrights. IP rights-holders have the right to seek relief for their actual losses as well as for loss of profits.