A study of platform-oriented copyright dispute resolution mechanism on WeChat

Abstract

WeChat, as one of the most popular mobile applications in China, has become an indispensable part of people's life. It is reported that WeChat's monthly active users by 2020 have reached 1.151 billion. More than 80 percent of WeChat users subscribe to Official Accounts. Based on the WeChat Official Accounts Platform, a user-generated content (UGC) industry is taking shape. However, with the continuous expansion of the UGC content industry on the WeChat Official Accounts Platform, many issues need to be solved. The most common one that affects the order of the WeChat Official Accounts Platform is the copyright infringement issue. Combating copyright infringement, encouraging the publishing of original content and maintaining the healthy ecology of the WeChat Platform are not only the aims of WeChat Platform, but also the wishes of WeChat Official Accounts’ producers and subscribers. This research takes the WeChat Official Accounts Platform as the research object, and focuses on copyright infringement issues on the platform. Text-image types of copyright infringements are chosen to be analyzed since they account for the majority of online copyright disputes on the platform. By employing doctrinal and empirical research methods, the thesis aims to answer the following major research questions: 1) What approaches do the platform and the court adopt to resolve copyright disputes that occur on the WeChat Official Accounts Platform? 2) How do the platform and the court cooperate and complement each other in the process of resolving copyright disputes on the platform? It is argued in the thesis that a platform-oriented regulatory framework should be adopted in regulating online copyright disputes. Online platforms, as the intermediaries between platform users and legal enforcement sectors, serve as private suppliers of legal infrastructure in the relevant fields to solve online disputes effectively and efficiently. They also support the state-legal system to provide systematic and comprehensive legal protection and the rule of law in China. This research aims to supplement the deficiencies of existing literature in the fields of platform self-regulation and dispute resolution in the content industry. By analyzing the interaction among different regulatory bodies, this research may help discover the complementary relationship among them. It is hoped that this research could contribute to the future design of online platform regulations and shed light on the studies of new media and China’s contentious public sphere.