Research On The Impacts Of Copyright Protection On China's Film Industry

With the global development of economics and life,culture industry has gradually become a pillar industry in the western developed countries,called the sunrise industry which drove the economic development.Among these,the film industry especially is the one which has the fastest growing rhythm in these years.In our country,with the increased demand of the customers and government's attention and support,the film industry is experiencing great changes.According to the statistics,in 2017,our country produced 798 feature films,while the total box office amounted to 559.11 million yuan and the number of city cinema viewers reached to 16.2 million.In addition,China has become the country with the most film screens in the world as the film screens reached 50,776 at the end of 2017.However,it has been faced with more difficulties about intellectual property right during the rapid development process.The core value of films lies in its copyright.If a large number of films were infringed or pirated,it would seriously hinder the healthy and sustainable development of the film industry.At the present,most domestic scholars have evaluated national or regional copyright protection intensity,and some others took qualitative analysis or descriptive statistics to explore the effect of copyright protection on the film industry,but lack of the further deep research on the relationships between them.Hence,it is quite essential to standardly adopt the quantitative analysis method to estimate its impact of the film industry.Firstly,this thesis defined the concept of copyright,film industry and film copyright.After learning the domestic and foreign literature,we set up the theoretical model to discuss the copyright protection's influence on the film industry separately from the views of film scale,profits and social welfare.Then it used the time-series data(2005-2016)of our country as well as 30 administrative regions to do statistically analysis of the current situation about the film industry,the copyright protection level and its effect on Chinese film industry.Based on the analysis of the current situation and the factors affecting the box office,it used the panel data of 30 provincial-level administrative regions of China during 2005-2016 to test the effect of copyright protection on film consumption level,referring to the existed qualified methods about the copyright protection level.Using the fixed effect model,the results show that,in the view of whole country,when the level of economic development,the economic cycle and the population size are controlled,the level of copyright protection has positive impact on the film box office,but the intensity has obvious regional difference among the eastern,central and western regions,for that effect in eastern region is clearly higher than the other two areas and the central area is the weakest by comparison.In terms of the two-period estimation,it shows that the number of screens per person in each region has no significant impact on the movie box office.It also finds that the ratio of urbanization has positive impact on the box office.Meanwhile,economic growth cycle has negative effects on the film industry,and economic slowdown may stimulate the film industry.Finally,some suggestions on how to effectively utilize copyrights to promote the development of the film industry are given on the basis of the above analysis.