Legalization of live game streaming through statutory licence in China

Live game streaming depends on the use of audiovisual images of the games play, which may infringe the copyright of game developers. In recent years, there has been a surge in copyright litigation initiated by game developers against players/streamers in China. The courts needed to resolve several fundamental copyright issues in these cases, such as those pertaining to copyright subject matter, economic right, and copyright limitation. This article provides an in-depth exploration on copyright doctrines relevant to live game streaming industry, following by a proposal of new statutory licensing mechanism specifically for live game streaming. We argue that the proposal can properly balance various interests of different stakeholders in the game industry, such as incentive and proper reasonable compensation for developers, platforms' dissemination of entertaining information to the audiences, and gamers' development of professional skills. Under this mechanism, streamers would be allowed to stream games without permission and streaming platform operators would be automatically licensed for game streaming and obliged to remunerate game developers. Compared to the traditional "one-to-one" licensing, the proposed licensing scheme would effectively reduce transaction costs and improve licensing efficiency.(c) 2022 Zhaoxia Deng and Jyh-An Lee. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.