Page 29 - 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: Chapter 1 Introduction
An Intermediary-oriented Approach

the primary reason for creating UGCs, (viii) the UGC creators’ profits from UGCs, and (ix)
the UGC creators’ attitude towards the UGC platforms’ profiting from their UGC and the
modification of their UGCs.
Four hundred and ninety-two answers were collected, of which 489 were used,
comprising 419 answers in Chinese and 70 answers in English. As the author of this thesis
is from China, most of the respondents were from China. Other respondents were from
or living in Asia, the US, other American countries (south, central), Europe, Oceania and
Africa (Questions 4, 6, 18, 20 in Appendix 1). Due to the rapid growth of China-based
UGC platforms such as TikTok and WeChat, obtaining responses from UGC creators from
China provided more insight into the latest UGC developments. Though the questionnaires
were distributed through the network of the author of this thesis, the key conclusions drawn
from the questionnaires, such as the non-commercial incentives for UGC creation, the
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unwillingness to be exploited by UGC platforms, are in line with secondary data.
The empirical study of 30 platforms’ ToUs/ToSs

I also carried out an empirical study of the ToUs/ToSs of 30 major UGC platforms
hosting different categories of UGCs, including blogs, fanfiction, photos, music and videos.
88
Although Casey Fiesler and Amy Bruckman did a similar study on the ToUs/ToSs of
different UGC platforms, they focused on the US. As UGC platforms have rapidly developed
throughout the world, especially in China, this thesis included US-based, China-based and
EU-based UGC platforms. The list of the UGC platforms contains Asianfanfics, Fanfiction.
net, Tumblr, Wordpress, Bilibili, Zhihu, Quora, Harrypotterfanfiction, Archive of Our Own,
Overclocked Remix, ccMixter, SoundCloud, Remix 64, the Otaku, DeviantArt, YouTube,
Dailymotion, Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, Sina Weibo, WeChat, TikTok (Douyin in China),
Kwai (Kuaishou in China), IMDb, Facebook, Pinterest, MySpace, Craigslist and Dianping
(Dazhong Dianping in China).
To add more diversity to the UGC platforms, I also studied a broader scope of terms in
ToUs/ToSs than previous studies. The factors I took into account included (i) the category
of adhesion contracts for ToUs/ToSs (shrink-wrap, click-wrap, scroll-wrap, sign-in-wrap
and browse-wrap contracts), which is shown in Appendix 16, (ii) the length and readability
of ToUs/ToSs, which is shown in Appendix 17, (iii) the age requirement, (iv) copyright
ownership of UGCs, (v) the scope of the license of UGCs from UGC creators to UGC
platforms, (vi) the period, termination and revocation of the licence of UGCs, (vii) the agent

87 See supra note 10; OECD (n 2) 9; Niva Elkin-Koren, ‘User-Generated Platforms’ in Rochelle C. Dreyfus, Harry First &
Diane L. Zimmerman (eds), Working within the Boundaries of Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press 2010) 121.
88 This method is generally referred to as ‘content analysis’, which is defined as an empirical study by which ‘a scholar collects
a set of documents…, reads the documents systematically, records consistent features of each one, and then draws inferences
about the use and meaning of those documents’. Mark A. Hall and Ronald F. Wright, ‘Systematic Content Analysis of
Judicial Opinions’ (2008) 96 California Law Review 63, 64. See also Barton Beebe, ‘An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright
Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005’ (2008) 156 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 549, 554, note 13.

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