China steps up its commitment to protect creators’ works from being infringed in the NFT space

In a bid to protect copyright and stimulate creativity, the Chinese Government has intensified its efforts to monitor people who copy other creative works without their consent to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The National Copyright Administration (NCA) will clamp down on offences such as the minting of NFTs based on other people’s works like art, cartoons, music, video games, etc without permission.

The move is part of a two-month campaign rolled out jointly with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Public Security Bureau and the Cyberspace Administration of China.

The NCA believes that supervising copyright violations and imposing penalties on violators in the digital collectibles space has become vital in order to strengthen creators’ rights in the virtual arena.

The goal is to promote a “market-oriented, legalized and international business environment, and provide the copyright support needed to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation,” the agency said.

NFTs have received a lot of interest in China during the past twelve months. The virtual assets are sometimes referred to as digital collectibles in order to disassociate them from cryptocurrencies, which have been officially banned from trading since 2021 as a result of a protracted crackdown.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) tracked down and closed about 12,000 crypto related social media accounts as they were being used to mislead people by “guiding” them to invest in virtual assets under the pretext of “financial innovation and blockchain,” prompting substantial loses.

Several Chinese companies have already reduced their NFT operations due to increasing legal difficulties and declining public interest following last year’s initial excitement.

In September, social media and video gaming giant Tencent Holdings announced that it will stop issuing digital collectibles on its NFT platform, Huanhe, to the public.

But fans continue to remain active in the space. Before the start of this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, some “digital mooncakes” were sold online for about 10,000 yuan.

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