“Power” of copyright, Lv Wensheng’s strategy for video websites
(China IP)
Updated: 2009-10-25

“Power” of copyright, Lv Wensheng’s strategy for video websites

Lv Wensheng, Board Chairman of JOY.CN Corporation Limited

Lv Wensheng, Board Chairman of JOY.CN Corporation Limited, was under great pressure during the past few years not only from the investors but from this industry.

As policy maker of an online video website, he has been insisting on purchasing authentic videos ever since 2006, when he started www.joy.cn, without using a single piece of pirated material. People around him didn’t understand. “It is really hard to explain the idea to investors or my company staff, especially the latter.” He also said, “I am the only person on this and sometimes I feel so lonely.” Lv talked much during the whole interview, but these two remarks gave the China IP reporter a deeper sense and impression of the heaviness of his burden.

Fortunately, the pressure is in history now. “I felt relieved when I heard of the announcement of the establishment of the ‘China Online Video Anti-Piracy Alliance,’” said Lv. Recently, and presently, people have begun to understand and appreciate my idea; To buy authentic videos instead of using pirated ones has become a consensus among the whole industry.”

Looking back at the development of Joy.cn and online video sites, we can see that Lv’s insistence on authentic videos was neither a simple “ideal” nor “self-sacrifice” to China’s intellectual property course. In fact, he grasped the core of online videos as an industry as early as a few years ago: content. In this trade, only the possession of a large amount of copyright resources can keep a company at the top of the industrial chain.

Lv has been building up his content. Now, copyright has brought him not only a respected profile, but the largest capital for future development of Joy.cn. A “right” has granted him a “power” to gain an upper hand in the industry.

Choosing authentic videos A true video-sharing site named Maxduo also appeared on the Net in early 2006. Without any promotion it became ranked as seventh place among video sharing sites and globally in the top 900 in terms of traffic. But it suddenly vanished a few months later.

Now, “Maxduo” is in the Baidu search engine and has introduced the first product of the “Podcast channel-Joy.cn-China video portal”, while the domain name www.maxduo.com also directs or hyperlinks you to the channel. This may seem new, but actually it was the site Lv constructed when the concept of “video sharing” was at its peak which facilitated its growth.

“We made a video-sharing site in early 2006, called Maxduo, but today few people know of it. I closed it after five months with a loss of 10 million Yuan. The reason was simple: serious copyright problems. Almost everything on the site was pirated and some of it was illegal. It was a standard sharing site, with fairly good traffic, but it was completely against my values. Today’s podcast of Joy.cn stemmed from Maxduo, but with all unlicensed and illegal content rooted out,” said Lv.

The concept of video sharing became popular in 2005, when the huge traffic brought by community and sharing aroused great interest from venture investors. Copyright was buried under the attraction of traffic and capital. However, it was his past working experience that made Lv abandon piracy resolutely, which he believed as being against his convictions.

In the early 1990s, Lv was one of the founders of Chengdu Business Daily. Then he became a media investor and engaged in the operation companies of many newspapers, such as 21st Century Business Herald and Huashang News. A decade in printed media had taught Lv to understand that the core of content industry is nothing but copyright, and copyright must be obtained legally. “I was under great pressure for closing Maxduo because I lost more than 10 million Yuan. Although there were still investors, I could by no means ‘fool’ them, since piracy would go nowhere,” Lv recalled.


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