Copyright Extremophiles: Do Creative Industries Thrive or Just Survive in China's High-Piracy Environment?

摘要

Examine China's film and music industries, and the picture that emerges is less sanguine than some scholarly narratives suggest. The alleged benefits of piracy in China are exaggerated or illusory, and do not outweigh piracy's substantial harms. Creators and creative industries persist in China despite extreme levels of piracy, and for some observers this fact might raise doubts about the social value of strong copyright. But the mere fact that some producers have adapted to a high-piracy environment says little about the value of copyright in society, just as the existence of extremophile organisms adapted to severe living conditions tells us little about the optimal conditions for thriving biological diversity. As Professor Merges argues, for creators to thrive, conditions must be right to afford them the two things they need most to incen-tivize creativity and support their ongoing creative development and efforts: reward and autonomy. This, in effect, means that the optimal environment for cultivating high quality creative production is one that supports a stable, economically robust professional creative ecosystem. In China's high-piracy environment, the film and music industries' monetization models have evolved to rely almost entirely on physical and technological exclusion, respectively. The resulting industries are neither robust nor stable-certainly not to the extent that they could and should be. Instead, because piracy has usurped most revenue streams, both industries are hyper-dependent on a single revenue stream - box office revenue in the movie industry and ringback tone revenue in the music industry.