Online authors open new chapter in IP battle

Protecting authors' rights

Wang urged the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, the Ministry of Culture and screenwriters' associations to make combined efforts to strengthen the copyright and labor laws to protect the rights of young screenwriters, most of whom never see their names in the credits or on crew lists.

Ba Tu, a veteran scriptwriter in Beijing, told China News Agency that he spent 10 years climbing the ladder from ghost scriptwriter to established professional. "Sometimes, I only slept three hours a night to write scripts for the next day. Two members of the crew provided my meals and pressed me to hurry up every morning," he said, recalling his early years in the business.

Xiao Yu, a 26-year-old ghost scriptwriter who graduated from the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, told Tencent that writers are often fleeced by companies. "After days and nights of hard writing, I begged the producer to ensure my authorship rights when the work was completed, but he refused immediately," he said.

"The famous screenwriters have assistants and enough funds to work at home and do research. It is unfair of them to criticize us young scriptwriters for not paying enough attention to the quality of our work because we work in totally different environments," Xiao said. "The polarization of the writers' world does no good to anyone, including the readers, except the famous writers."

According to Beijing Youth Daily, well-known TV scriptwriters can make as much as 500,000 yuan per episode, but a ghost scriptwriter in Beijing will receive no more than 8,000 yuan.

"The companies should realize that they will only have a continuous stream of good stories and ideas when intellectual property rights are well protected. It's a shame that some companies and scriptwriters openly plagiarize or steal other companies' or people's innovations and ideas," said Zhang Tianxiao, president of Shanghai Fantasia, an animation, movie and television company.

"Scriptwriters are respectable talents, not cheap laborers. The lack of professionalism and dignity shown to many young screenwriters is an important cause of the low quality of China's movies and TV plays," he added.

The China Screenwriters Association was set up in 2011, but because it was established to protect the writers' legal rights, most of the members are well-known professionals. The association's rules mean ghost screenwriters are not eligible to join.