Piracy of Internet literature has led to 7.7 billion yuan ($1.18 billion) in lost subscriptions last year, according to the 2015 White Paper on China Internet Literature Copyright Protection produced by consulting company iResearch.
A popular term used among online literature writers is "piracy in seconds," a complaint referring to how quick and easy it is for pirated literature to spread.
Unlike movies or music, Internet literature can be illegally reposted on another website in just a few seconds.
A group of Chinese online writers that have been working to fight piracy for years have reported that forums on popular Internet platform Baidu Tieba are havens for a substantial amount of pirated literature works.
According to online writer Mad Banana, who has been publishing chapters for his novel Zhui Xu since 2011, a search for his novel on Baidu returns a Baidu Tieba forum where netizens can pirate his work. Writers such as Mad Banana are furious that Baidu promotes pirated sources rather than block them. Even more infuriating to the author, when clicking on a search result that would take a netizen into the official forum for his novel, Baidu has a message reminding users that they can switch to the non-official forums featuring pirated material.
According to the White Paper, BBS-like sites, download websites or cloud services account for more than 50 percent of traffic for pirated novels. Of these three, 64.3 percent of traffic is on BBS sites, making them the main means to spread piracy.
Piracy has long been a thorn in the side of Internet literature that damages the value of its copyright. The prevalence of piracy lowers revenue earned by original literature and related official websites, thus reducing online writers motivation to create.
"Infringement of Internet literature copyright is a worldwide phenomenon, not just limited to China. As Internet technology improves, it becomes a bigger problem for the world when it comes to how to solve piracy," Li Shunde, from the Institute of Law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the People's Daily overseas edition.
Organizations in China have already begun working towards finding solutions.
During the National Conference on Copyright Protection in a Digital Environment held by China's National Copyright Administration on April 26, government officials and business leaders agreed that the strengthened protection of Internet literature should be one of their main focuses for 2016.
In fact, efforts to prevent piracy have been around for years. The National Copyright Administration, Cyber Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Public Security joined together to carry out a law enforcement campaign titled Operation Sword and Net to fight online piracy back in 2005.
Since it launched, it has cracked down on nearly 3,000 illegal websites, and brought cases against Baidu Library and video players Baidu Player and QvodPlay.
In 2015, this operation poured unprecedented effort into protecting music copyrights, greatly improving the state of the online music industry in China.
It seems now that focus will shift to Internet literature.
