Friday is usually a slow news day. Not this week! Check it:
1. Tudou, Youku In Increasingly Ugly IP Spat
China’s two biggest video streaming sites started throwing punches at each other this week. First, Tudou released a presser threatening Youku with legal action for pirating two episodes of a show Tudou owns the rights to. Youku fired back with a release stating that Tudou has pirated dozens of Youku programs it doesn’t have the rights to. Most recently, Tudou responded to Youku’s response by saying “Nuh-uhhh!” and threatening to tell Mom. Or, you know, something like that. This is getting ugly!
2. Beijing Says Real Names to Be Required for Microblogs
The Beijing government dropped a bombshell this Friday — albeit a bombshell we’ve all been expecting to fall sooner or later — when it announced that henceforth, all Weibo accounts must be connected to a real identity offline. We and many others speculated this might well kill Sina Weibo’s atmosphere of open political discussion and cause the company to hemorrhage users. We’ll see.
3. Will Weibo Stay Political?
We looked at Sina’s year-in-review and offered some thoughts about what it might look like next year. Of course, that was before we heard about the new regulations (see #2 above!) that will make real-name registration a requirement for Sina Weibo.
4. Group Buying is Bad for Consumers
This week we saw two stories about group buying from the consumer side of things. First, advocacy groups around the country released a report saying group buy sites have violated consumers’ rights, and then the Beijing government released statistics showing that consumer complaints about group buying sites have increased twenty-eight-fold since last year.
5. Dangdang’s E-bookstore Set to Launch
Dangdang is set to take a leap into the digital realm this week, when it will launch a full-fledged e-bookstore, with books, magazines, and other things I’m sure people would love to read if they weren’t glued to their computers all day!
That’s all for this week, folks! Thanks for reading. For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.