Artificial intelligence Photo: VCG

"In the age of generative AI, copyright protection faces its greatest challenge ever," Liu Qingfeng, chairman of Chinese tech giant iFlytek, said at the Ninth National Conference on Copyright Protection and Development in Digital Environment held Thursday in Hefei, East China's Anhui Province.

The conference gathered more than 600 participants. Discussions covered pressing issues in the digital copyright ecosystem - from law enforcement and technological development to emerging challenges in music streaming, micro-dramas, short videos, online games, sports broadcasting, and AI-generated content, according to the organizers.

In his opening remarks, Hu Heping, executive vice minister of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, underscored the growing importance of internet copyright in China's digital economy. 

"Our country's internet copyright industry has reached a scale of 1.6 trillion yuan [$222 billion], and its share in GDP continues to grow steadily," Hu said. He noted that 2024 marked the first time China's copyright registration volume surpassed 10 million cases. "High-quality copyright content has become a foundational resource for the development of the internet industry."

Hu detailed recent campaigns that have achieved tangible results, including an internet campaign targeting online piracy and youth-focused copyright protection. In the past year alone, authorities investigated 1,018 internet-related copyright infringement cases, shut down 393 illicit websites, and deleted over 3.4 million infringing links. Enforcement efforts have focused on key areas such as short videos, livestreaming e-commerce, web novels, search engines, and cloud storage platforms.

On the international front, China has deepened cooperation under the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) framework and conducted bilateral copyright dialogues with countries including the UK, Japan, South Korea, and Cambodia. A China-Europe seminar on copyright protection in the digital environment was also held to promote multilateral cooperation.

Yan Xiaohong, president of the Copyright Society of China, highlighted landmark cases that shaped China's copyright enforcement landscape. "Back in 2009, the 'Tomato Garden' software piracy case became the first criminal prosecution for software infringement in China," he recalled. "The handling of this case was a powerful deterrent - many piracy websites closed almost immediately, and the case was well received internationally."

Yan noted that the copyright crackdown in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was another milestone. 

"We set up a dedicated office and deployed top-level search engines for 24-hour real-time monitoring of unauthorized broadcasts," he said. 

"Beijing achieved zero complaints of Olympic copyright infringement - a remarkable feat."

Software piracy, once rampant, has been brought under control due to a series of government directives. Zou Tao, executive vice president of Kingsoft, shared sobering statistics from the company's early days. 

"In 1989, the genuine usage rate of WPS software was only 0.15 percent. By 1997, it had barely reached 1.2 percent," he said. 

"[WPS CEO] Lei Jun once used to say we were trapped between Microsoft ahead and rampant piracy behind." 

Zou credited policies such as the State Council's 2004 notice mandating government use of licensed software and subsequent regulations targeting enterprises and public institutions for turning the tide.

Yet the rise of AI brings new complexities. Liu warned that AI models may produce highly convincing but fabricated content, so-called "hallucinations," that blur the lines of authorship and truth. 

"Generative models may confidently provide the wrong answer, then immediately agree with corrections," he said, calling this a "pleaser personality" developed through training feedback. "These models behave like humans - and just like humans, they are unreliable."

Several initiatives were launched to reduce hallucinations and improve copyright compliance, including document-grounded knowledge retrieval, human feedback training, and digital watermarking technologies. Liu said their AI tools are already being used in law enforcement and legal trials to assess code theft, trace authorship, and assist judges in determining substantial similarity in copyright disputes.

Looking to the future, Liu emphasized the need to rethink copyright in the context of AI-generated content. 

"If large models learn from real-world experience, who owns that experience?" he asked. 

"The definition of public versus private knowledge, and the mechanisms for tracing value back to the original contributors, remain major questions for our time."

The two-day conference was hosted by the National Copyright Administration, co-organized by local authorities.