Last week Rebecca MacKinnon wrote a post called Web innovation: Why Hong Kong lags behind Mainland China and Taiwan in which she writes about a seminar in Hong Kong titled 'Copyright = Creativity? ', organized by Hong Kong In-Media and the Open Knowledge Project. Excerpt:

There were three speakers: Isaac Mao, mainland Chinese blogger and entrepreneur, "Titan" Deng Chieh of Wikimedia Taiwan, and Charles Mok of the Hong Kong Internet Society.

Interestingly, both mainland China and Taiwan have developed more similar approaches to copyright, as both have chafed under pressures from the United States to crack down on copyright violations more than they feel is really in their national interest.

Isaac and Titan both pointed out that all countries need to find a middle ground between too little and over-zealous copyright protection. If there is too little (which has been China's problem) everybody steals everything and there is no incentive for creation. If there is over-zealous copyright protection (which many believe is now the situation in the U.S. and in Hong Kong) the law is used to reinforce powerful monopoly control over what is or isn't a "legal" creative work, making it more difficult for individual and entrepreneurial innovation to take place.

Isaac believes that the growth of blogging and the expansion of Web2.0 in China is connected to the fact that the Chinese take an expansive view of content sharing - some might argue over-expansive, but he believes that the "free culture approach," and a generous approach in terms of what constitutes "fair use" and "public domain," has been critical.

We are entering a "post copyright" era, he believes. "The past was an era of macro-creation," with cultural works being produced by big companies. "Now we also have to protect the interests of micro-creators," he says. The problem is that traditional copyright approaches - including Hong Kong's approach - tend to protect the big players while suppressing the emergence of smaller players.

Isaac said that filmmakers in China are realizing that letting netizens sample their films in spoofs and fan-works actually helps drive up box office sales. He said that Chen Kaige withdrew his lawsuit against internet spoofer Hu Ge after realizing that all the spoofing actually generated more buzz around the movie and caused more people to watch it. Treating your fans as criminals is bad business in the long run. A middle ground needs to be found.