Lessons for educators suffering copyright breaches

2020/06/18

In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, online education has gained popularity due to the need for reduced travel. But industrial insiders said the emerging sector has much to tackle regarding copyright protection.

Market consultancy iiMedia Research forecast that the number of domestic users receiving online training will reach 309 million. Its market scale is expected to achieve 453.8 billion yuan ($63.97 billion) in 2020, according to China Intellectual Property News.

Wei Jia, legal counsel of tutoring service provider TAL Education Group, spoke at a recent seminar on intellectual property concerning online education in Beijing. He said that the company has filed complaints with an e-commerce platform, had more than 14,000 links carrying unauthorized courseware deleted and 274 involved stores shutdown since October 2019.

However, infringements are continuing, Wei added.

A large number of pirated course videos are sold for lower prices in corners of online platforms, he said. "It costs only 50 yuan for a link loaded with a huge number of online class videos, involving countless courses."

The same thing happened to online education platform Yuanfudao.

A manager at Yuanfudao told China Intellectual Property News that the company has spotted illegal sales of its course resources on third-party platforms.

These unauthorized resources are normally shared by links or network disks, the manager said.

Zhu Ge, a judge from the Beijing Internet Court, said that in judicial practices, online courses can be protected as oral work and teaching materials and test papers as literary works.

Source: China Daily