Recently, a video about the Tang poet Li Bai went viral, the author cleverly quoted Li Bai’s poems and dedicated to his daughter, the video got more than 100k views. However, it was later revealed that his whole idea was polarized from an article published in 2017. As a result, many people are concerned about the rampant copy right infringement on social media these days. JAVY’s Zhao Zhanling Esq. commented on this issue when interviewed by state media Zhejiang Online.
As Mr. Zhao pointed out, the video work has a high probability to be “substantially similar” to the article, in that case, even the author of the video didn’t tag it as original and didn't aim for profit, it could still constitute an infringement, because this is a direct violation to the copyright law.
As the copyright holder, the original author can sent a notice of infringement directly to the infringer, requesting the latter to delete the infringing work and apologize, if there is no response, the copyright holder may file a complaint to the platform that hosts the infringing work and request the latter to delete it. And if both remedies fail, the copyright holder may file a lawsuit in court and demand compensation.
Mr. Zhao also mentioned that we must consider the specific circumstances to decide whether a certain work constitutes an infringement, if the original work has only a few sentences, and you take one of them as your own work, this will be considered an infringement, but if the original work has a lot of content and you only quote one sentence from it, this usually will not be considered a violation.
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