New | Popular Chinese news app 'Today's Headlines' investigated over copyright controversy
State watchdog investigation casts doubt on future of popular news aggregation app, valued at US$500 million.
China’s copyright watchdog is investigating 'Today’s Headlines', a popular mobile news app, for potential copyright infringement as traditional news organisations struggle to compete with aggregators.
Yu Cike, the director of China’s National Copyright Administration’s division for copyright management, said the regulator had received numerous complaints by unnamed traditional media outlets over the aggregator’s republishing of their news articles.
The investigation comes at the beginning of a joint campaign by the copyright watchdog, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State Council Information Office into online copyright infringement dubbed “Operation Swordnet”.
Yu’s remarks were carried in Monday’s edition of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece paper whose website design hasn't changed in years.
Today’s Headlines, China’s No 3 most downloaded news app in May, aggregates news from major newspapers across the nation and curates the news articles according to readers’ interests on its phone and tablet platforms. It is owned by Beijing-based Beijing Byte Dance Telecommunications, which also has a news aggregating website and a Weibo account with 1.8 million followers.
Byte Dance could not be reached on the phone for comment.
