Online vs. print battle in China goes to court

This story has been coming at me from various different places over the past couple of weeks and increasingly looks as though it will be watched as a new benchmark for several key China media issues:

1. Internet and mobile content as fully-fledged media businesses.
2. Copyright.

The International Herald Tribune ran a story yesterday which notes that "The Beijing News is seeking $400,000 in damages from a popular Internet site called Tom.com for having copied and republished more than 25,000 articles and photographs without authorization since 2003". On the IPR front, some have welcomed this; only once Chinese companies start to value their own IPR the argument suggests, will copyright 'religion' really come to China. We shall see.

The other angle to this, as pointed out by Fons Tuinstra on Christmas Day is the way it throws light on the way in which the Chinese authorities continue to constrain on-line businesses from running their own fully-fledged media operations. He reminds us of the history of all this:

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.

This is all somewhat complicated, of course, by Tom Group being officially a Hong Kong company and, according to Chinese media regulation, theoretically treated as a foreign company. As part of the Li Ka Shing empire, however, Tom appears to have been exempted from many of the restrictions on foreign ownership which trouble other media companies.