The National Radio and Television Administration has published its updated Content Review Standards for Online Short Videos (2021), listing 21 categories of prohibited content across 100 items. Notably, item 21 bars unauthorised cutting, editing or adapting of films, TV series, online dramas and other audiovisual programmes or their fragments.
Short video and self-media creation is booming, but intellectual property – copyright above all – keeps generating disputes.
The scale of the problem
The 12426 copyright monitoring centre’s 2020 report found 30.09 million suspected infringing short videos between January 2019 and October 2020, generating 2.72 trillion views, with exclusive original creators suffering a 92.9% infringement rate.
Clip-based infringement by account operators grows worst of all. Professional ‘scissors hands’ re-cut hit shows into segments with personal commentary – a ‘watch a whole film in X minutes’ video can easily top 100,000 likes. Others splice different source material into new stories, so-called ‘internet films’, for redistribution. Do these acts infringe copyright?
Under the Copyright Law, rights holders hold 17 rights including the right of communication through information networks and the right of adaptation – re-cutting existing works into new creations likely violates both. Experts are blunt: the common copying, clipping and arbitrary editing all fall within infringement.
The industry pushes back
In April, more than 70 units including iQiyi, Tencent Video, Noon Sunshine and Huace Film issued a joint statement: mass unauthorised cutting, clipping and redistribution infringes rights holders, damages work integrity, distorts original meaning and hurts the industry’s long-term development – and announced concentrated legal action. The National Film Administration likewise pledged, with the copyright authority, to intensify enforcement against infringing short videos and unlicensed copying and distribution.
Sun Zhonghuai, Tencent’s vice president and CEO of Tencent Online Video, noted that clip-and-transport videos not only violate copyright but dissolve artistic value: a production can take seven or eight years to make and hundreds of millions of yuan to finance – simple clipping turns it into a speed-watch summary.
Enforcement with nuance
Regulation keeps improving, and platforms must hold their ground in copyright protection – supervising and gating content to protect originals and creators’ enthusiasm. But tighter oversight does not mean every short video becomes infringement by default.
At a China University of Political Science and Law seminar, scholars backed the ‘safe harbour’ principle from the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act: under a notice-and-takedown rule, platforms that show no malice and promptly remove infringing links bear no liability. The principle defines the boundaries of content distribution while respecting the internet’s openness, sharing and equality – it should be used well.
As 5G drives ever more short-video creation, only strict legal compliance and copyright protection will give the industry a healthy online ecology.
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