Rights protection costs are high and profits are huge. Counterfeit performances are rampant and difficult to stop

Driven by high profits, copycat performances that risk infringement are still growing savagely in second-tier and third-tier cities. From "copycat dramas" to direct copying of company brands, infringement is getting worse.

Original title: Why is the "Li Gui" performance company rampant?

Song Cheng Performing Arts recently sued Song Yun Culture and other three companies to the court for infringement and claimed 5 million yuan, which attracted great attention from inside and outside the industry. In recent years, the accelerated expansion of the performance market has not only provided development opportunities for formal performance companies, but also provided opportunities for many copycat performance companies. Driven by high profits, copycat performances that risk infringement are still growing savagely in second-tier and third-tier cities. From "copycat dramas" to direct copying of company brands, infringement is getting worse.

Shanzhai companies are not alone.

Nowadays, shanzhai performances have gradually upgraded from a straw team composed of several people to a large-scale company. This is also reflected in the case where Songcheng Performing Arts sued Song Yun Culture and other three companies for infringement. Songcheng Performing Arts said that after successfully building the "Songcheng" and "Ancient Qing" brands,"performing arts" have become the company's core competitiveness. In particular, the key performance project, the large-scale song and dance "Song Cheng Eternal Love", is currently the theater performance with the largest number of performances and the largest audience reception in the world every year. After years of continuous use, the "Songcheng" trademark has gained high popularity. However, from 2013 to the present, Song Yun Culture has prominently used logos with the same or highly similar trademarks and brand names as Song Cheng Performing Arts in performances and other services in the "Little Songcheng" Cultural Tourism Commercial Zone, which has greatly damaged the legitimate rights and interests of Song Cheng Performing Arts.

In this regard, the relevant person in charge of Song Yun Culture said that the "Thousand Returns of the Song Dynasty" performed in the "Little Songcheng" Cultural Tourism Zone is an original play with an investment of 80 million yuan. It is different from the "Eternal Love of the Song City" performed by Song City Performing Arts."Thousands of Returns of the Song Dynasty" interprets the history of the Northern Song Dynasty, and the move of Song City Performing Arts is just for hype. However, some industry insiders pointed out that although the performance content is different,"Little Songcheng" does use the reputation of "Songcheng" to promote its performance content, which is also a manifestation of the performance industry's "hanging sheep's head and selling dog meat".

However, the reporter's investigation found that this phenomenon is not an isolated case in the industry. In December 2016, drama director Wang Chong discovered that his old work "The Beauty and Sorrow of Jobs" was being performed in Xi'an, but he himself did not authorize any performances in Xi'an. However, the organizer Xi'an Qujiang Dahua Woke Cultural and Commercial Management Co., Ltd. still put the name of Wang Chong on the promotional poster, and the production team was basically from Xi'an.

In addition to large-scale performances, this phenomenon appears more in overseas introductions. In 2014, the circus show "Dark Temptation" held a large-scale tour in China under the banner of the well-known "Cirque du Soleil", but some consumers questioned that the participating group was a copycat group. Later, the organizers stated that "Dark Temptation" was not a performance by Cirque du Soleil, but that some of the actors in the play were from Cirque du Soleil. However, with the help of the brand effect of "Cirque du Soleil", the box office of "Dark Temptation" has been rising all the way, and the project organizer Hangzhou Tianli Company has naturally benefited a lot from it.

Rich profits have driven infringement to continuously

watch cultural performances and gradually become a new way for people to relax and entertain. In order to meet the needs of the audience, the number of theaters and plays in various places has shown an increasing trend year by year. More and more high-quality plays, performance forms and young directors have been unearthed, and with the help of the influence of Internet communication, these plays have also attracted the attention of a large number of consumers. However, the hard-earned fame of well-known repertoire performances has made many copycat performances a wedding dress.

The reporter found that the cost of producing a new drama is usually about 500,000 yuan. In order to create a better look and feel experience, the cost of a drama using a large number of 3D, robots, multimedia and other forms is at least more than one million yuan. If it is an overseas performance, the performer will also have to pay a considerable introduction fee. Previously, the introduction cost of Argentina's "Passion Tango" Chongqing Station alone was as high as more than 2 million yuan, and the cost of a single performance was more than 1 million yuan. Although there are some differences in the initial cost of various performances depending on the types of plays and performance occasions, the necessary service expenses, the polishing of scripts and the selection of cast are all necessary elements for creating a good drama.

Li Ping, chairman of Beijing Ugly Duckling Troupe Co., Ltd., pointed out that among the upfront costs of a play performance, the most expensive is labor costs. In order to present the best stage effect, regular performance companies will definitely hire professional performers, and at the same time, they will also bear the social security expenses of these actors. In addition, some influential plays that start touring require a large amount of rent for performance venues.

On the other hand, some copycat performance groups have very low cost to "copy" a well-known play after "waiving" copyright fees. Performance scripts can be obtained for free on the Internet, and the performers do not require professionalism. The original play videos are the best teaching materials, and sometimes even the arrangements of the performance venue are very arbitrary. A performance group revealed to reporters that in fact, many copycat performances also know that such practices are infringement. In order to avoid risks, the name of the performance is sometimes slightly revised, but when promoting, they still use the name of the original play to attract consumers."We usually perform in fixed areas, and usually only local people come to watch it. After a round, we can earn about hundreds of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yuan. Although there are risks, the profits are really attractive."

The high cost of rights protection is the biggest obstacle.

"The high cost of rights protection is also one of the important reasons why copycat performances are difficult to stop despite repeated prohibitions." Chen Liqiang, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Tianjin Normal University, said that improving consumers 'awareness of rights protection can effectively reduce the cost of rights protection for creators. Audiences directly connected to the performance market should take the initiative to say no to copycat performances, otherwise bad money drives out good money, and high-quality performances will also be difficult to enter second-and third-tier cities."While the performance market continues to prosper, relevant responsible departments should also continue to improve their management levels and rationally allocate the market distribution of performance content. Avoid the situation where markets in some regions are saturated while other regions have huge demand gaps. After all, enjoying high-quality performances is a right that consumers should have."

"Whether it is performing well-known plays without authorization, or using others 'existing fame to promote their own performance content and mislead consumers, infringement will actually be involved." Zhao Hu, a lawyer at Beijing City Dongyi Law Firm, said that at present, the overall number of infringement cases in the field of tourism performances is small, but in the fields of drama, drama, children's drama, etc., such phenomena are common, mainly because the "copying" cost and difficulty of imitation of these plays are relatively low, but such unfair competition behavior will not only cause huge damage to the original work, but also stain the company's reputation.

The relevant person in charge of the National Center for the Performing Arts said that for performance companies that focus on high-level artistic creation, there is actually not much time and energy to pursue the content of copycat performances. However, the investment in a play is essentially different from copycat and genuine. The difference is that the audience can make a difference. Only by having trust in the brand can the audience have sustained consumption power.

But in fact, there are still a small number of audiences who can truly experience high-quality dramas. In second-tier and third-tier cities where high-quality performances cannot cover, huge consumer demand is difficult to meet, so copycat performances have become rampant. At the same time, the dispersion of performance areas also poses huge obstacles to supervision, making it difficult for creators to proactively discover and investigate infringement phenomena. Take the drama "Heaven and Earth" as an example. The copycat version of the play "A Born for a Pair" was performed in Chengdu for 26 times before it was accidentally discovered by the drama director Yin Tao. Unexpectedly, the other party not only refused to admit plagiarism, but also called "Stop a thief". Yin Tao had to While safeguarding copyright, he also launched a lawsuit to protect reputation. It took three years to win two lawsuits.

Editor: Nancy