The recently established Beijing-based committee for the identification of movie and TV drama copyright will provide improved judicial expertise to deal with plagiarism in the industry, insiders said.

The committee is the first of its kind nationwide and includes 14 legal experts and 12 professionals in the TV and literature businesses. Entrusted by the courts, the committee compares relevant works and identifies plagiarism.

"The experts' conclusion submitted to the court will serve as an important foundation for the judge to make a ruling," said Liu Heping, standing deputy director of the China TV-Series Screenwriters Committee.

For years, the number of lawsuits involving movie and TV drama copyrights has topped all other kinds of copyright cases nationwide, said Su Zelin, deputy director of the China Behavior Law Association.

"In addition to the large number, such cases involve many new problems and challenges," he said. "The difficulties in identifying a drama using an unlicensed screenplay or one drama copying another have become a heavy burden for the judges. It is also difficult to decide on compensation."

Su said there are many identification agencies for intellectual property rights, including some working on copyright, but none of them are focused on the movie and TV drama business.

He said the scale of film and TV drama content is massive, and the products involve diverse ways of expression, such as speech, music and art, so it requires strong professionalism to judge if a work is plagiarized.

Screenwriter Wang Hailin, a member of the new committee, said that plagiarism in movies and TV dramas is complicated and there are different measurements.

He noted the case between the popular Taiwan romance novelist Chiung Yao and mainland screenwriter Yu Zheng two years ago as an example. "The plot, characters and actors' lines in the two writers' works are different. There may be no plagiarism in the eyes of a judge, but there is in the eyes of drama professionals".

In December 2015, the Beijing Higher People's Court ruled in favor of Chiung, ordering Yu and four companies involved to pay 5 million yuan ($724,753) in compensation.

"The committee finds plagiarism more from the drama perspective. That's what we do here," Wang said.

Jiang Kunye, general manager of Beijing-based marketing company Da Entertainment, said: "It is easy to find a drama copying another or a drama copying a book, but things become complicated when a drama is adapted from a book that copied another.

"In many cases, the drama adaptation only borrows the name and general framework of the story, and changes most of the plot, so in the end it could turn out to be a dispute between two books, and experts are needed to examine the relationship between the drama and the original book."

Cao Ping, a TV drama producer, said self-discipline in the industry is even more important than supervision. "Everyone should focus their energy on creating good work to reduce disputes," she said.

(China Daily 04/13/2017 page17)