Reading APP's "Stealing" Exclusive Books Makes Hundreds of Millions of Yuan A Year And is Suspected of Infringing Copyright

Earlier, Beijing police received a case about an Internet technology company that almost ten thousands of electronic books are suspected to be infringed. The Beijing police then organized the brigades, Haidian Branch Bureau and other departments to form a special team and started investigating the case.

According to the informant from that company, from the end of 2017, they have discovered that there are many APP that have their exclusive writers’ popular serial novels. The novel App gets the exclusive novels from the writers and pay the writers by 5 cents per 1000 words. The loss of exclusive fiction stolen by multiple APPs is incalculable.

The prosecutor tells the reporter that through collecting evidence, they discovered that the Apps that have these pirated books all come from a company named “Dingyue”. The police officer soon found that the company's location is an office building near Xierqi.

Through investigation, the police learned that Dingyue illegally gets access to the reporting company’s copyrighted book resources. They rely on more than 10 Apps and earn through advertising and other means. When users click on reading the novel each time, the commercial company pays advertising fee by the number of clicks.

According to statistics, Dingyue has over 10 thousand electronic books with a click of more than 10 billion times suspected of infringement, and has hundreds of millions of illegal revenues annually. After further investigation, Dingyu Company made huge profits by embedding advertisements in books and works in the form of advertising alliance. The scope of infringement involved 998 authors in 30 provinces in China. The post-project team lasted for five months. Through forensics and comparison between the original author and the online book, it was determined that Dingyu Company had infringed copyright.

Knowing the infringement, the software engineers of the Ministry of Literature will crawl the data of electronic books on APP of other companies through crawler software, edit, proofread and review them internally, and store them in their own cloud server. The new business department is responsible for developing and reading APP and connecting the data in the cloud server to reading Apps; Media Department is responsible for contacting advertising business for profit.

At present, 12 senior executives and business backbone of Tan Mou, Ke Mou and Liu Mou have entered the stage of examination and prosecution for alleged infringement of copyright.

October 12, 2019

Source: Beijing News

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