This article examines the role of copyright in production and labor relations within media institutions. Specifically, it examines China Central Television’s (CCTV’s) copyright reform and argues that developmental strategies and market conditions may diminish or promote copyright’s role in commercial media. In CCTV’s case, two factors contributed to the insignificance of copyright in the 1990s, namely, the reliance on advertising as the major revenue source and CCTV’s centralized power in the television sector. Yet the circumstances changed in the 2000s with the slowdown of advertising growth, which brought copyright to the forefront of CCTV’s market reform. During the process, the dominating role of CCTV vis-à-vis non-unionized media workers resulted in copyright reform that was slanted toward corporate interests. The implications of the path of CCTV’s copyright reform are highly relevant for understanding media and copyright growth in contemporary China and in other media systems undergoing contested processes of marketization.
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