Zhuanzai

media - Redefining the relations between online and offline media

Danwei tries to make sense out of a court case started by Beijing News, suing tom.com for republishing their articles without permission. Beijing News has started in 2004 to sign contract with most of the major commercial portals, but tom.com has ignored those requests.
That led to legal exchanges and now a court case, where the common practise by online media to republish news from offline media (Zhuanzai) is under attack.
With all the due respect for the legal issues Danwei tries to define here, I believe we have basically a political problem here and that makes the situation maybe even more interesting.
When the internet emerged at the end of the 1990s in China as a new medium, the newly-established internet companies started to hire journalists. That caused a fit in the government, because they suddenly discovered they had set up a new media channel that lacked the sophisticated censorship systems the traditional media are having. In stead of setting up a new censorship system, the government ruled that online companies could not hire their own journalists but could only republish news from the official media.
That led initially to misgivings among the online media, but in the long run they complied and because they were not limited by constraints of time and region, like the traditional media, they were able to produce rather attractive online products.
A few of the larger players have since signed contracts to formalize - and sometimes compensate - the usage of official news online. Since the first half of 2005 the growth of ad revenue for the print media stopped to grow and print media started to look at the growing revenue stream of online media. But basically, the old situation is still in place.
So, since online media are still not allowed to run their own media show, it would actually be rather unfair to expect them to pay for the usage of news from government-owned media.
Most likely, that relationship has to change, but that will be more a political debate than a legal one.