Page 273 - A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law：An Intermediary-oriented Approach

A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law: Appendix 2 Interview Record (Participant A)
An Intermediary-oriented Approach

announcement.” Once you tag your article with “originality announcement”, you can
choose whether you require “republication with authorization” and “republication with
compensation.” “Republication with authorization” is what I told you. Unauthorized
republication will jumped back to our link. “Republication with compensation” is what
Maidu adopts.
Huang: So why don’t you choose “republication with authorization”?
Participant A: Because we still want to increase our popularity.

Participant A: We have imposed some limitations on republication. For instance, you can
only reproduce one article in the same series. Last month we have released a special
section on mainland law firms including King & Wood Mallesons, Zhong Lun, Jun He
and Hai Wen. A public account would like to reproduce all these articles and I definitely
rejected. I only permitted it to reproduce one article. Besides, if the article is not
published within three days, the permission would be automatically withdrew.
Huang: Why do you have such regulation?
Participant A: Recently there is a trend of storing authorized articles. These articles formed
a pool and released in appropriate time. Nowadays there is a chaos in public accounts’
license. For example, Lvya has recruited many volunteers to ask for authorization.
Sometimes I receive several requests on one article from different volunteers from Lvya.

Huang: Would it take you a long time to deal with such issue?
Participant A: It depends. The last topic was about mainland law firm so we received more
requests than usual.
Huang: Authorizations should be given by you rather than your volunteers, right?
Participant A: Yeah. You can see the requests only after logging in the public account system.
Volunteers are not authorized to log in.
Huang: How much time it takes to manage the public account?
Participant A: Four to five hours each week.
Huang: Only in weekend?
Participant A: No, I log in and deal with these issues every day.

Huang: Have you encountered any legal disputes?
Participant A: Well, I think the only dispute is piracy. Once I identified unauthorized
republication, I reported to WeChat. And this reported account contacted me, but I
rejected their requests without any exception.
Huang: Why did they contact you?
Participant A: Ask me not to report or to withdraw report.
Huang: Why did they think you will agree?
Participant A: I don’t know. I have never agreed. I remembered that one public account

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