Web giant Tencent obligated to tackle pirated content

FOR EVERY ONE WRITER THERE ARE 99 PIRATES, ready to copy - that sentence, quoted from a recent Xinhua News Agency report, best describes the rampant violation of copyrights on WeChat, a social media platform popular in China. Many accounts do not produce any original content at all and all they post are copied articles. Comments:

In order to expand the market for WeChat, its creator and operator Tencent adopted a strategy of loose supervision over piracy and the toleration of copyright violations. However, now that WeChat is the market leader the copyright protection is still inadequate. Besides, there is hardly any law covering copyright protection on social networks. To make it worse, ordinary WeChat users only read free articles everyday, without troubling to report any that have been copied and so helping the original writers defend their rights. To address the problem of piracy requires the efforts of all sides, namely Tencent, the government and users.

Beijing News, Feb 2