A Study on the Safe Harbor Rules for Online File Hosting Service Providers Under Copyright Law in China

Abstract

Today both the U.S. and China are plagued with copyright infringement, particularly infringement involving online file sharing via file hosting services. The safe harbor rules in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (here after “DMCA”) §512(c) provide a certain amount of protection for contributory infringers, such as file hosting service providers, as long as certain conditions are met. Although China has borrowed extensively from DMCA §512(c) in setting up its own safe harbor rules, their content and standard of review remain unclear, leading to inconsistencies in judgments. In this circumstance, this thesis tries to analysis each element of the safe harbor rules, critique the unclear standard of review of them, and examine the reasons for the current standard of the “safe harbor” in China. In order to solve the current “standard” and “implementation” problems, this paper advocates amending the law, to unify the rules and to establish a detailed standard of review by comparing the safe harbor rules of China with those of the rest of the world