Copyright Protection for Variety Shows in China

摘要

The first season of the popular Chinese reality talent show, Sing! China concluded on 7 October 2016. Behind the success of the show lies a controversial copyright dispute between Talpa Holdings (Talpa), owner of The Voice franchise, and Star China Media (SCM), Sing! China's production company, which produced the earlier four seasons of The Voice of China under a licence from Talpa. What is seemingly a typical legal dispute between two television show production companies underscores a broader issue of copyright protection for reality shows. Without a full script, variety shows lack the reproducibility found in other protectable forms of work, and are therefore poorly protected under the copyright regime. Nonetheless, with the variety show industry proving to be an increasingly lucrative business, there is a need to investigate deeper into the current state of copyright protection as applied to variety shows, and look at how the law can better protect variety shows from exploitation.