So who really took the picture?

1. Who owns the fake tiger?

With the discovery of a five-year-old poster of a tiger identical to the one Zhou Zhenglong claimed to have photographed in the wild last month, the South China Tiger controversy is lurching toward the conclusion that most people anticipated from the start. Even the head of the Shaanxi Forestry Department has admitted that the affair is essentially over—an abrupt turnaround from what Guan Ke, the department's publicity head, said the previous day when he scoffed at the obvious Photoshopping of Zhou's tiger onto a poster of a waterfall.

When the poster was first discovered, and before more copies were dug up across the country, Zhou threatened to sue the unknown Photoshoppers for infringing on his rights and smearing his good name.

Even before this, some observers had raised the copyright issue in regard to Science magazine's publication of one of Zhou's photos. Constance Holden, an editor at Science, said that the magazine had originally planned on paying Zhou a fee for the use of his photo, but subsequently found out that the government had paid him for the photos; it decided that the image could be freely used. The magazine credited the photo to Zhou, but Beijing's Mirror evening paper talked to a lawyer who said that as the photographer, Zhou deserved a usage fee as well.

It's all moot now, although it probably wouldn't surprise many people if the company that published the tiger poster didn't hold the copyright to it, either.

A Sanmianxiang book.

2. Have you been sued by this man?

A recent profile of Zhan Qizhi in New Century Weekly bears this tagline:

First, buy up copyrights from authors. Then sue the websites who repost the articles. In three years' time, he has sued 300 websites across the country. He's even brought his legal action to Tibet, where it became the first intellectual property case in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Zhan Qizhi (詹启智) runs Sanmianxiang Cultural Development, a book packaging company whose main products are collections of test-prep material: sample essays, mock exams and the like. He also runs the Sanmianxiang Copyright Agency, which aggressively pursues unauthorized uses of that material.

The name Sanmianxiang (三面向, "three faces") comes from an inscription written for Jingshan School by a politician that Zhan greatly admires: Deng Xiaoping wrote, "Education must face modernization, the world, and the future."

"It's not just education that must have three faces," says Zhan. "Publishing and cultural industries also need three faces."

Zhan's cultural company did not own the copyrights to its works; his greatest obstacle when he was designing books was the issue of copyright.

"I could work with the publishers to resolve things using rights granted by the author, but there was one problem: if pirated editions came out, I had no right to deal with them under the law, because I did not own the copyright. So I took advantage of transfer of copyright: I acquired the copyright from the author to make protecting those rights much easier."

Zhan says that he acquired practically all of the copyrights to his company's books through copyright transfer contracts. "Actually, the copyright agency was set up to serve the cultural company."

Zhan has been methodically going after local and regional government organizations who repost material to which Sanmianxiang owns the copyright: he's filed more than 300 lawsuits over the past three years. His targets often accuse him of entrapment or compare him to the sort of person who seeks to cause and accident so he can benefit from a personal injury lawsuit afterward. To other observers, he's an "online Wang Hai," but he dislikes being compared to the consumer rights activist because of rumors that Wang's only in it for the money. Although Zhan says he has a success rate of 99%, he also claims that he hasn't made any money off of his lawsuits—he's just acting to protect the market for his books.

Just last week, however, Zhan's string of victories came to an end. In March of this year, he sued Huaxia Business Net for violating the copyright of 171 articles by 13 authors; at a rate of 100 yuan per 1000 characters, Zhan claimed losses of 318,200 yuan, and provided signed statements of copyright transference as evidence.

Huaxia's defense was based on the relative frequency of name collisions in China. "It's not hard to find a photocopy of an ID card bearing the same first and last name, so the plaintiff's claim of infringement is untenable," said Huaxia's lawyer. The court in Nanchang agreed with Huaxia and rejected Zhan's claim.

Novoland!

3. Any D&D players in the house?

Pictured at right is The Novoland Fantasy, the latest magazine/anthology released by the Novoland collective.

Novoland (九州) is a cooperative world-building project that aims to create a fantasy world that draws its inspiration from early Chinese mythology as opposed to the elves and orcs of Lord of the Rings. Here's how Jiang Nan, who was around for the genesis of the project almost six years ago, described how it began to take shape:

As an example of a well-designed, detailed fantasy world, the west has the famous D&D system. That world-design gave rise to the classic Dragonlance Chronicles, well-known game series Might and Magic and Heroes, and the card game Magic: The Gathering, as well as countless films. This system has become one of the primary representatives of fantasy culture in the west. But the east, particularly China, has never had a strictly-designed, shared fantasy world—people spin their own stories that, like drops of rain into a surface of a lake, splash briefly before vanishing. Or they rework ancient legends into a New Creation of the Gods, a Brand-New Journey to the West, an All-New Eight Immortals, or a Brand New Nezha Challenges the Dragon King, until everything's unrecognizable and insipid. Have we lost our capacity for innovation and creativity?

In a 2005 interview, Jiang Nan elaborated on that last point:

The consolidated imperial power for nearly 2000 years exists against this background of Confucian culture. If, when writing about the purification involved in dynastic transitions, you also address the magic war between the winged folk and the giants from across the ocean, it'll be incredibly chaotic. Besides, novels like Canonization of the Gods, Journey to the West, Liaozhai, and In Search of the Supernatural deal with ghosts and spirits, but this is not the sort of thing we're going for. Completely imitating western novels, with their magic and elves, is something we're even less interested in.

The result is a fascinating fantasy world centered around a group of nine kingdoms spread out across several continents. The dozen or so books that have already been published, as well as the stories in the various Novoland magazines, mostly take place in that part of the universe, but there are also authors who have taken advantage of the legendary realms described in The Classic of Mountains and Seas to write stories describing the marvelous lands beyond the borders of the nine kingdoms.

It's one of the rules of the genre that a fictional world needs a role-playing game if anyone's going to take it seriously. To that end, an appendix to this Novoland volume presents a brief introduction to the long-awaited D20 version of Novoland and to table-top role-playing in general.

The Novoland game is distributed under an Open Gaming License, a system that allows enthusiasts to freely adapt and reproduce D20 rules and sourcebooks so long as a license is included. One page of The Novoland Fantasy is devoted to reproducing the English-language text of the license, as required under the rules.

It's a small thing, but in a climate where Baidu is afraid to adhere to conform to Wikipedia's free-reuse license, it's nice to see an open license working out in China.