Team size: Nineteen

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

My legal team is exclusively focused on collective copyright management law in China. Over the past three years, we’ve brought a series of lawsuits against karaoke, webcasting, and restaurant chains. This work has advanced the judicial practice of solving copyright problems through the collective management of copyright system. Since more than 70% of cases are resolved through settlement, it is not appropriate to disclose the opposing parties.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

First of all, maintaining confidence is crucial. We boost our team’s morale through victories in significant cases. For young legal professionals, a sense of accomplishment in work is more important than monetary rewards. Second, trying to innovate. As the traditional karaoke industry began to decline, we swiftly shifted our focus to the increasingly popular online live streaming rooms. Based on the new copyright provisions granted by Article 45 of China’s Copyright Law, we have carried out a series of targeted actions.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

AI, of course. In the field of copyright, AI technology revolution has introduced a lot of theoretical and practical issues. For example, should AI-generated works be protected by copyright law? Chinese courts have rendered different judgments, sometimes contradictory, and there are many debates in academia, especially in the field of music, because AI composition is harder to identify than AI writing or AI painting. Another question is whether AI model training should compensate the copyright holders. Should this be considered as fair use or statutory licensing? Different countries have adopted different legislative approaches, while many others remain in a wait-and-see stance. All of these are bound to have profound implications on copyright law.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

The impact of AI is unprecedented. In transactional tasks such as data analysis and document formatting, AI has greatly improved work efficiency and reduced costs. However, we need to be extremely rigorous in legal work. AI hallucinations make it hard to distinguish accurate information, which is an issue demands serious attention.

How does your team contribute to the overall business strategy of the company? Can you share an example of a recent legal-led initiative that had a significant impact?

Non-member litigation is a unique phenomenon in China, which seriously threatens the foundation of the copyright collective management. Since 2022, we have assisted our clients to deal with thousands of such malicious lawsuits from multiple perspectives such as ownership proof and legal sources and have achieved excellent results. Our efforts have not only safeguarded the legitimate rights and interests of a large number of copyright holders but also reinforced our clients’ confidence in resolving copyright issues through the collective management system.