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This text is based on the recording of the interview to Walter Dillenz on Nov.20, 2009 on the International Conference on the Trends of Copyright Protection hold by Zhongnan University of Economic and Law.
Q: There is a trend of the integration of television, broadcasting, and the internet; what's your comment on this and will it bring some problems?
A: This has been happening for the last 20 years, and in the future, television broadcasting and the internet will be linked. Things are getting technical. For instance, 5 years ago, Bluetooth is unknown, and there is no Bluetooth connection between the TV sets and computers. Now the time has come for the real integration of all these devices.
Q: So it is just a serve as a new reader that we can use from the internet, so that we can watch the TV through the internet. That will also bring about a lot of issues, may be concerning the intellectual property rights. How to protect that kind of rights?
A: We have some new phenomenon, like the making available right to upload something to the internet. Via the classical TV, that will never happen because that’s a one-way street. You receive pictures and sounds from the TV screen. The inter-activity between you and you can ask questions and influence the programs. That is a new phenomenon and a challenge to copyright. You have a material and you upload it, are you allowed doing this, or do you have to ask permission? If so, by whom do you ask permission? It’s difficult. When we are looking our company for which I am working, which is a collecting society of audiovisual rights, we had a flier and we thought people would put the real old-fashioned film; we were not profiting because we thought it looked nice. We were trying to find something in the internet, and we found lots of pictures of the film screen. The first question was about how we get the right to put these on our flier. That’s where the real problem started. You find all sorts of things on the internet, but whom do you ask if you can use it for some commercial purposes? We found somebody; we were not sure at all if he was actually the right owner, but he came: “yes, I am the right owner, I am the photographer, and you may use these on 500 Euros.” Then we can use it, but we could not be quite sure if this was correct, because someone else might be the right owner. So this general situation of insecurity that you don’t know who the real right owner is, to whom you pay is a big problem. So that’s, in my view, one of the questions: you find a lot of materials, but once you want them for you personal or commercial use, then it’s a question of trusting a person that he has the rights.
Q: Internet makes it possible to download music and films easily. Under this situation, how to protect copyright effectively while balancing the public interest?
A: There has been a positive development in the last 6 months or so. There are statistics which shows that the illegal downloads are decreasing, the same degree as the legal downloads have been made available. The reason is, up to now, the strategy of the music industry is to forbid downloads. You have heard the ugly cases that singing mother who did this and had to pay 600,000 dollars for the downloads of 5 pictures, and then you have the 14-year old boy who did the same and had to pay 1,000,000 dollars. That was the strategy of the music industry picked out a few persons and fined them with 600,000 or 1,000,000 dollars, but that doesn’t work on the long run. So the real solution would be to offer an affordable download. iPhone started charging 99 U.S. cents for one song to be downloaded. If they would have charged 10 dollars for each download, this would not have been competitive with the illegal downloads. So you have to find a person when you say: “Well, this person can get the song illegally from the net downloading and it cost nothing, but there is a risk of paying 1,000,000 for him, so how much do I charge for a song?” “It I only pay 99 cents for a song, it is not worth to risk of the illegal downloads. So I will pay the 99 cents!” I think that this problem is being solved in the legal way, but in the commercial way finding business model making people pay for their downloads of music, but not so much. The problem will be solved in the longer run.
Q: As a chairman of the association of the collective management of copyright in Vienna, do you have any suggestion on China’s collective management of copyright?
A: Because you have so many individual acts of reproduction downloading and uploading, you can not really control it. The management system which register and identify each download can make money for each of the download goes to the person who uses it. So we didn’t need any body like the collecting society 2 or 3 years ago. Then it turned out to be a technical system which will find if this is used by somebody who knows how to use it. But in itself as a system, it is a tool you can use. But this tool must be used by somebody, and there is nobody more appropriate than the collecting society. It might use the system in the future because it’s capable of automatic identifying of each use of work. You need somebody to push the money from the user to the author and the creator and the collecting society will do this using the system.
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Interviewer: Cheng Shijie
Words: Zhang Shuqing
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