Still, it takes much less time for people to realize the importance of copyright protection over short videos compared with the streaming music market. MF+ revealed to TMTpost that it had just be connected to China Copyright Protection Center’s entire system of infrastructure. Although only Jianchang Video received the certificate up till now, over 200 audio and video producers have already been registering for copyright protection.

　　China has just taken the first step in copyright protection of short videos

　　Different from overseas market, China has always been lagging behind in copyright protection, whether for online music, film and TV series, or literature, etc.Chinese users and consumers’ awareness for copyright protection is still weak. Therefore, copyright protection has just started on the eve of the boom of the short video industry.

　　According to Zhong, no Chinese short video producers has ever made any profit through copyright. Most short video producers’ business still relies highly on ads and e-commerce platforms. Liu Xingzhe, Copyright Center of Pear Video, also pointed out once that short video producers couldn’t make much profit from copyright. In their copyright purchase practice, they found that even leading short video producers such as BBC only charged around 100 dollars for each short video.

　　However, this doesn’t mean that copyright is like chicken ribs in the short video market. On the contrary, proper copyright protection will not only create a healthy market environment for original video producers, but also be vital for short video distribution platforms’ development.

　　There’s an obvious trend in the Chinese short video market: “traffic is increasing gathered around the head”.In other words, a minority of PGC-based platforms are attracting the majority of traffic and people’s attention. Therefore, their contents will become exactly what distribution platforms need most. So it is likely that the future short video market may witness fierce competition for super IPs.

　　This trend is proved as major short video platforms have stopped focusing much attention on the number of short videos uploaded in their strategy. It is reported that TouTiao has quietly tightened the monitoring over PGC, so that PGC’s original information will be automatically synchronized and channels that brazenly “copy” and “cut” others’ original contents will be restricted from withdrawing their profit, and their behaviors will be strictly monitored and tracked.

　　For Wen, MF+ was established to not only help content entrepreneurs distribute and protect copyright, but also maximize the value of “unused materials”.

　　“It is typical to leave some materials unused when recording and editing short videos. Suppose you have a fifty-minute video, but you may edit and cut it into five-minutes-long. Therefore, 90 per cent of the material is unused. MF+ want to create a platform and help short video producers to extract value out of these unused materials,” Wen told TMTpost.

　　It is, of course, worth looking forward to. However, it may take a couple years before the Chinese short video market can go away from unrestricted development and develop in a healthy and orderly manner. After all, it’s not an easy thing to protect copyright in any field at any time.

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　　[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Han Pei, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

　　Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost.