Recently, the online author "Jiangshan Tibi" discovered that the articles he wrote on the official novel website were not only stolen by the pirated website "Biquting", but also that the novel that originally only updated 245 chapters had been updated to 1369 chapters ahead of time on the pirated website. The matter sparked heated discussions online.
On the afternoon of July 18, the reporter contacted Sun Shanshan, whose pen name is "Jiangshan Tibi". He is a "post-00s" online writer in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. "There are so many pirated websites that I can't finish reading. The website I found alone has more than 1,000 hits."
Is "continuation" of pirated websites counted as literary creation?
Sun Shanshan is a signed writer of Qidian Chinese.com and has 7 years of writing experience. He likes to write a novel and change his pen name, "Jiangshan Tibi" is one of his "vests". A few days ago, he accidentally found a "tweet" of his novel on the short video, that is, he recommended the short video of the novel in the form of "anime + copywriting". Different Doomsday: Insanely Printing Tens of Billions of Underworld Banknotes at the Beginning", the title of the book was changed to "Invincible Godfather", the author and copywriting are the same as the original one, what's even more outrageous is that this novel, which was updated to chapter 245 on the genuine website, has been updated to chapter 1369 on the pirated website, which is faster than the original author's creation speed.
On the short video platform, "Invincible Yifu" has a lot of tweet traffic. The threshold for creating online literature is low, which attracts creators with literary dreams to devote themselves to writing. However, this is also a pyramid-shaped industry. "A small number of 'great gods' have gained both fame and fortune, and 99% are still ordinary creators." Sun Shanshan said that he is one of the 99% ordinary online writers. "I am relatively stupid. For an ordinary author like me, there is a word in the industry called 'pushing the street', but I like this industry." The
online article carries Sun Shanshan's dream. He started writing online articles in high school. At first, he wrote them in a notebook, and then he wrote them densely. Later, he spread them on the novel website. He failed to sign contracts seven times.
Now, he has a full-time job with five insurances and one housing fund, and he still insists on writing novels every day, often staying up late to create. "Pirated websites are equivalent to stealing the fruits of your labor, taking advantage of readers, authors, and formal platforms." The existence of pirated articles is a big blow to original writers who rely on manuscript fees.
"Strange Doom" is almost Sun Shanshan's best book, with 140,000 fans on the Qidian Chinese website, and 40,000 to 50,000 fans on QQ Reading. "But compared to the traffic of tweets, my income is very small, and each chapter is less than 100." He said that the tweets of "Invincible Yifu" have reached 5.8 million views on Douyin; the tweets of "The Way of the Ghost King" on station B have more than 2.8 million views. In fact, the copywriting of these two books comes from his novel "Weird Doomsday". At the same time, whether the "continuation" on pirated websites should be regarded as literary creation has also sparked heated debate. Previously, there were cases of "continuation" on the Internet. Some authors abandoned the novel halfway, but the writers on the pirated website finished the novel, which made people laugh and cry. A reasonable "continuation" is naturally a literary creation. For example, in the field of traditional literature, the writer Liu Xinwu is famous for "continuing" "Dream of Red Mansions". However, it is inferred from common sense that it is unlikely that Sun Shanshan's "Weird Doom" will be continued artificially, and it is difficult for pirated websites to create a new thousand chapters of content in just a few days. After Sun Shanshan found out about the pirated version, he gave feedback to the editor of the genuine website, "This is the first time I have encountered such a situation.Most people guessed that it was continued by AI, or that one chapter was split into eight chapters. "A senior reader of
told the reporter that there are various ways of piracy on pirated websites, and there are not many who actually "continue writing", and if there are any, it is just a case. "The most is to copy directly. Once the genuine novel is updated, the pirated website will be updated later. Another way of piracy is to change the face, or change the title of the original novel, or change the title, author, and copywriting, but the content is pieced together, and paste B’s novel under the title of A’s novel. "
What is the solution to the piracy of online literature? After Sun Shanshan's novel was infringed, China Reading responded that it would further collect evidence and investigate and launch a rights protection action. On the afternoon of July 18, the reporter searched on the search engine and found that relevant pirated novels were no longer found. If there are 10,000 genuine readers, then there may be 100,000 readers who read this novel on pirated websites. The
reporter learned that there are two types of online piracy methods, manual typing and automated mass theft. The former is highly dependent on manual labor and presents a trend of "scattering and frequent posting"; , Application market promotion, access to advertising for profit, etc., has formed a complete black industry chain of "piracy-distribution-advertising". With the help of new technologies, the piracy industry chain is showing a trend of concealment and maturity, and the characteristics of low threshold and low cost are becoming more and more obvious. "China Literature Group stated that due to the large number of pirated platforms, the infringer could not be identified or found to be a backdoor company or an overseas company after confirming the subject. may infringe the right to adapt the work. The characters and titles of the original works are used in the following chapters, and if paid subscriptions are used to make profits, it may be regulated by the "Anti-Unfair Competition Law". "
due to the low cost of infringement and high cost of rights protection, facing online piracy, most authors lack the energy, time, and economic cost to protect their rights. Some online writers said: "What authors can do is to appeal for genuine copies, or manually prevent theft. First upload new chapters that have nothing to do with the plot, and then update the correct chapter content after the pirates capture it, or provide piracy clues and entrust the platform to protect rights." Most authors of "
" don't have so much energy and money to defend their rights, unless you are a well-known author, the attention will be relatively high. I hope that through this matter, everyone will pay attention to ordinary creators like us. "Sun Shanshan said that usually he would not take "anti-theft" measures, "If a little development is found to be a waste manuscript, it is easy to hurt genuine readers. "
Right now, Sun Shanshan is "finishing" his novel. "After the piracy incident, this novel has attracted a lot of attention. Some readers pointed out some shortcomings. I started to refine it from the beginning, changing from more than 30 chapters to 110 chapters. I wanted to write a better story." "
At present, most genuine novel platforms have their own anti-piracy methods. For example, China Literature has independently developed an anti-piracy system, which can "delay" the time for novels to be stolen. The longest protection period for a single chapter of a work has been increased from 48 hours to 7 days, which protects the interests of authors to a certain extent, but still cannot prevent the existence of piracy. 410,000 attacks on the website. At the most violent time, Reading could receive 8,000 access attacks from the same IP in one minute, and had to compete with 25 pirate gangs a day. "Hou Xiaonan, CEO of China Literature Group and vice president of Tencent's platform and content business group, described. The issue of
piracy is still a problem that plagues the online literature industry.
