Plagiarism Continues to Rampage in China
With the acceleration of digital transformation and onlineification, dependence on online shopping and e-commerce only continues to thrive in China. Customers online demand cheap products, and they crave wide product choices. This has fostered plagiarism in product design, in particular the fashion industry, generating approximately a hundred million dollars of profit in 2021 for Taobao, one of the biggest e-commerce platforms based in China. Almost anything can be found online, from fake luxury goods to copied designer clothes — there is an endless supply of options. Tmall, 1688.com, and Pinduoduo are also cunning profiteers of product plagiarism along with Taobao. Changes to the industry, however, maybe on the horizon in consequence of the nationally growing consciousness of copyright infringement.
Individual cases of plagiarism occur often as a result of self-interests. When plagiarism becomes a “culture”, though, the reason lies in the sociocultural system. According to Chinese communist beliefs, all property — including ideas — belong to the society and therefore should be kept as such. On the national level, the problem can also be evaluated from three different perspectives: the plagiarists, the consumers, and the victims. The plagiarists fail to realize the nature of their action, exploiting the fact that the public has weak copyright awareness which results in endless plagiarism; the consumers benefit from lower prices and a wider product range, thereby choosing to ignore whether the design was copied from elsewhere; and the victims do not know how to take legal actions or protect their work, resulting in the growing tolerance for plagiarism.
Copyright infringement becomes a much more serious issue when discussed on the global scope. The act is considered to be fraud and theft committed at the same time, and it is essentially stealing someone else’s intellectual property. The legal system is also much more established to protect the interest of creators to foster a safe community for creative activities. Even though the ethics have not changed, the simplicity in which copying can be done due to advancing technology means that more people assume the benefits of plagiarism to exceed its risks and ethical issues, escalating the issue nationally and globally.
