law - Nike's fine no IPR-victory

Stickman was at the center of a court case, that was hailed by the Chinese media as a landmark in the fight to protect intellectual property rights in China. The US firm Nike got fined US$ 36,000 for copyright infringment after being sued by the Chinese cartonist Zhu Zhiqiang.
The cartoon was used in a commercial Nike earlier had to pull under the pressure of protests saying the US company had hurt China's dignity.
Nike said it disagreed with the verdict and will most likely appeal at a higher court. Some of the bloggers support the arguments of Nike. "Stickman" existed in the public domain already for years, writes Isaac Mao, and is widely used in other artsworks.
Mao advises Nike's lawyers to study the internet a bit more closely, so they can come up with some better evidence to support their case.

life - Cold wave brings massive problems in Shanghai



Last night youngsters were throwing snowballs at each other in Shanghai under weather conditions I have never seen before. Every year we would discuss whether it had been snowing for ten minutes or fifteen minutes, but yesterday it snowed all day long.
Pretty nasty outside and many of the new car owners got stuck in the suburbs for hours, they complained in many radio talkshows, because the elevated highways were closed down. Not taxi's available last night.
This morning is was dry, but because of the very early cold wave, very slippery too. The poorly heated apartments in Shanghai add there bit to the energy shortage: all the heat of my airco is blown out of my apartment.

internet - China's ugly voices online

"Chatroom warriors" calls one of my friends them, neo-Nazi's is the harsher verdict of another one. The Tsunami disaster triggered off against a relatively small, but vocal voices, cheering the disaster that struck Indonesia as "a punishment from Heaven" for the etnic anti-Chinese riots a few years ago. Mostly they shout without name on the BBS's, but increasingly also using other tools at the internet.
Next to be hit by an eathquake will be Tokyo, the chatroom warriors, capital of one of China's other 'enemies'.
The Guardian wonders in an article today whether this minority is really as small and insignificant as my more reasonable friends think. "While hate-mongering is a feature of extremist internet chatrooms around the world, in China such inflammatory comments appear to represent anything but a small minority. In the past two years, small anti-Japanese protests have mushroomed into nationwide campaigns through the internet and mobile phone text messages", The Guardian writes.
Also their protests have more chance under the new leadership, one of their leaders says.

media - Half of the Chinese speak Chinese

The China Digital News pointed me at this excellent example of propaganda in de China Daily. The key finding of the State Working Committee of the Chinese language, says the story, is that 53 percent of the Chinese actually speaks standard Chinese. The Committee has worked six long years to get the result together. Only 18 percent of the Chinese speak Chinese at home.
To be honest, I know that Chinese is a pretty difficult language, but the result is still shocking, a little bit more than half of the Chinese speaks Chinese. What is the headline of the China Daily story: "Greater numbers speak putonghua". Guess they needed some creativity to find a positive angle in the story.

The changing media landscape – the WTO column

journalists up for horsemeat?

(soon also at Chinabiz)
Macdonald’s learned it the hard way during Christmas and a month before Nike discovered the force of the new media in China. Macdonald’s saw its website hacked, because it violated the ‘one China’ principle. Nike insulted, according to other unruly forces at the internet, China’s dignity, was forced to pull a commercial and even apologized – although I failed to understand how anybody could get upset about the whole commercial. Improved security might have helped Macdonald’s, but only in the short run.
What those incidents illustrate – whether you agree with the issue or not – is that companies are very slow to realize that a media revolution is taking place, even slower than my revered colleagues.
In some meetings I have been explaining them the way the new media work. I believe the change is as profound as when the first engine-driven cars entered societies that relied mainly on horsepower. It took a while but with very few exceptions those horses turned into horsemeat and that is exactly the danger that threatens us, journalists: we are about to become horsemeat.

Everybody can be a journalist now and our task is changing, if not disappearing. Mass media were needed because of the high costs of printing presses and broad casting stations. Now, because costs for disseminating news and information over the internet have been reduced to almost zero, the logic of the mass media is away and their once powerful positions can be eroded. The traditional daily paper in the morning and the news at eight o’clock are losing their position as the major information sources. Developing niche markets are replacing the mass market.
The speed of the erosion process of the traditional media depends on two factors: connectivity (like in South-Korea) and the absolute number of internet users (like in the USA). While much information floating around on the internet is not interesting for most people, to put it mildly, the chances that real alternatives for traditional media grow develop, as the experience in the US shows, when the volume increases and search techniques improve.
The atmosphere among the traditional media in the US is getting increasingly depressed, as prestigious magazines discuss how to save journalism, or even play with doomsday scenarios that include the demise of the New York Times. Media in Europe and Asia still enjoy in majority a blissful ignorance.
China will see a similar revolution in the coming few years, I predict, much faster than in much of Europe and the rest of Asia because relative connectivity and absolute numbers of Chinese internet users will be comparable to the situation in the US. With about 100 million internet users at the end of 2004, China’s media are not yet in the danger zone, as only in larger cities like Beijing and Shanghai about 50 percent of the households are connected. But the growth rate of the internet does not show any sign of slowing down. China has now as about 600,000 webloggers, less than one fifth of the number in the US.

Companies in the US are hitting the new trend, writes Fortune this week, with Microsoft surprisingly enough as the frontrunner, as it successfully countered an anti-big brother uproar among the webloggers. It was a revolution that took, after a slow start, two years to have a profound influence on politics and commerce. Dominating force are the over five million weblogs. No disaster can hit the world, without audiences increasingly turning to those new producers of information.
It is time for a wake up call for companies in China too. A media revolution is on its way.

Fons Tuinstra

blogging - Chinese bloggers start talking

Isaac Mao has initiated this new program, where Chinese bloggers start talking, literaly.

media - Wrong man, wrong place, wrong time?

The news popped up on my radar screen and I knew something was wrong. Australian media reported that Jiang Zemin, "chairman of the Central Military Commission" had signed a contract on behave of the army. They referred to a dispatch of the official newswire Xinhua, that had brought the same story.
I checked it again, yes, my memory was not that bad: it was a major story this year that Hu Jintao had taken over from Jiang Zemin. Now, the questions is: who more is going to take this story, and how did it start anyway?

tsunami - What can you say...


after more than 25,000 people got wiped away. So, I kept quiet for some time, and watched in horror.

media - Xinhua addresses discussion on dealth penalty

The discussion of experts on the dealth penalty in China has always been limited to some of the smaller Chinese media. This article by Xinhua, published by the People's Daily is the first one by both propaganda machines at the same time and in that way an important breakthrough.