China Moves to Stop Unauthorized Use of Digital Works as NFTs

In a Friday announcement, authorities in China began a campaign against online piracy copyright violations as they noticed an increase in unauthorized use of digital work.

Through a new initiative dubbed “Jianwang 2022,” the Chinese government will fight against online misuse of intellectual property with a focus on non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Jianwang 2022 is the result of the collaborative work of the National Copyright Administration of China (NCAC) and other related agencies.

The other agencies involved in the campaign are the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Internet Information office.

The new initiative will work on modifying existing copyright laws to reflect current realities associated with online piracy.

As such, Jianwang 2022 will set its focus on areas where intellectual property violations have been on the increase. One of these areas is the unauthorized use of people’s work as NFTs.

As per the regulator, it’s a common practice for NFT creators to use other people’s work to mint their collectibles without seeking approval from the owners.

Therefore the agency is looking to address this misuse of art, music, games, animation, television, and film via the new campaign, Jianwang 2022.

China intensifies its campaign against piracy

With the new drive, the NCAC in collaboration with other agencies will increase its surveillance in the NFT creators subsector in the country. It will also investigate and deal with cases of misuse of intellectual property. 

In addition to combatting the inappropriate use of digital works as NFTs, the agency also set its gaze on other areas to address online piracy.

These areas of abuse include unauthorized use of other people’s literary works to share information and unauthorized use of people’s works in online account creation. 

Also, the review will look at copyright protection for movies, audiobooks, and short videos amongst others.

Earlier in the year, Chinese regulators issued a new set of guidelines for the industry to mitigate NFT’s financial risk while it takes advantage of the underlying technology.

Some of these guidelines include banning the use of cryptocurrencies to trade NFTs and requesting for real identities of users amongst others.

In other unrelated news, Chinese citizens can now pay for transportation fares using e-CNY as it launched the next round of pilot testing for the digital currency.