CBBC and Douyin Hold First IP Roundtable in Shanghai

In collaboration with Douyin, CBBC successfully launched its first IP roundtable at Shanghai British Centre on 21 July, aiming to support rights owners in understanding Douyin’s e-commerce business model as well as its IP protection policies

Conor Murray, IP attaché from the British Embassy Beijing, delivered opening remarks for the IP roundtable online. Around 25 representatives from the food and drink, pharmaceuticals, publishing and luxury sectors attended the meeting and shared their IP concerns with Douyin’s brand protection and legal departments.

Douyin’s (the Chinese arm of TikTok) e-commerce department was established in June 2020, and its e-commerce business has since seen rapid growth, reaching RMB 20.8 billion (£2.3 billion)  in gross merchandise volume (GMV) during its new year shopping festival in January 2021. Douyin also exceeded 600 million daily active users (DAUs), according to data in August 2020. Douyin’s e-commerce business has adopted a combination of short video and live streaming, inviting influencers (达人) that range from level 0 to level 6 based on their sales promotion capacity, power of content, influence towards followers, and service ability, as well as sellers to promote and distribute products to interested Douyin users.

Douyin’s brand protection team took this opportunity to introduce its proactive monitoring measures to rights owners. Rights owners raised concerns about whether Douyin could proactively intercept users that misused their trademarks in Douyin IDs and nicknames. Douyin also provided a detailed introduction to rights owners on collaboration around test purchases and offline enforcement.

For the next step, CBBC will cooperate with Douyin to develop proactive monitoring and test purchase programmes, inviting interested rights owners to join these IP initiatives. If you are interested in learning more about Douyin’s IP protection measures, please feel free to contact us.