Party Hegemony and Entrepreneurial Power in China: Institutional Change in the Film and Music Industries by Elena Meyer-Clement

Author:Elena Meyer-Clement [Meyer-Clement, Elena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Public Policy, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Cultural Policy, Political Ideologies, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781317423324
Google: wOaPCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 26537307
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-09-16T11:59:15+00:00

For a long time, as a result of such practices and the weak institutions of royalty collection, many copyright holders did not even enter the MCSC, and many record companies did not bother about acquiring copyright when buying the record edition number from the publisher (MP1, Beijing, 3 October 2006). Moreover, even more actors were encouraged not to comply with the law and, instead, to play music free of charge in public places, such as restaurants, hotels and, above all, karaoke clubs. The CEO of a digital music company interviewed by the author, for example, did not pay royalties to the MCSC because he knew that the record companies concerned would not receive any of the money (MP10, Beijing, 14 September 2006). As a result, the new institutions of copyright protection failed to fight piracy and copyright infringement effectively and were not fully able to replace the traditional institutions of public propagation of cultural works. Their inherent weakness and high degree of ambiguity instead provided opportunities for non-compliance for an ever-increasing number of actors.

In addition, conflicts between different Party-state organs over the distribution of the new resources long delayed the implementation of collective management in the audio-visual industries. As early as 2001, the copyright administration had approved an application by the business association of the audio-visual publishing sector, the China Audio-Visual Association (CAVA), to establish a collective management organisation, and permission to set up the so-called China Audio-Video Copyright Association (CAVCA) was granted after the adoption of the new regulation for collective management societies in 2005. However, another three years passed before this new association for collective management was formally approved in May 2008.7 One major reason for the delay was a conflict with the Ministry of Culture (MoC) over the collection of royalties from the huge karaoke industry, which had not paid any royalties so far but had recently been legally pressured by record companies to compensate for their infringements.8 In view of the at least RMB8 million extra income in royalties that were expected from the over 100,000 karaoke establishments in China (Anonymous 2006b), the ministry had introduced its own royalty collection system, arguing that this was in line with its administrative responsibility for the karaoke industry. The CAVA president became very upset about these developments in a personal interview in 2006:

The Ministry of Culture has no right to do it. Theirs [their system for collecting karaoke royalties] is wrong. They cannot do it, because the Copyright Bureau does not give them authorisation. So what they do is illegal. If they want to do it, I will bring a lawsuit against them. If they do it, I will sue them!

(Beijing, 19 September 2006)

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