Poll Research on the State Quo of Copyright Protection of Ethnic Cultures in China: An Analysis Based on the 660 Questionnaires

In early months of 2019, the research team conducted a public opinion poll on copyright protection of ethnic cultures using such new media as WeChat groups and QQ groups. The questionnaire consists of seven sections with a total of 22 questions. 660 valid questionnaires were submitted. The analyzing results of the questionnaire show that presently people are satisfied with the protection of ethnic cultures, but the satisfaction degree is not high. A majority of people agree that concerning the current protection of ethnic cultures, there are two major problems. One is the lack of effective inheritance and protection mechanism of ethnic cultures. The other is that the public consciousness of copyright protection of ethnic cultures is weak. Most people hold that the bottleneck of copyright protection of ethnic cultures is the lack of effective channels for safeguarding copyrights and the unclear definition of copyright ownership. In addition, most people believe that the subjects of intellectual property rights of ethnic culture should be ethnic villages and/or inheritors or relevant copyright holders; and they also agree that the profits produced by ethnic cultures should be shared by the copyright holders if the cultures are utilized commercially. Most people think that the most important measures for the government to improve are to strengthen the training mechanism of inheritors of intangible cultural heritage and to improve laws and regulations, so as to enable local policies and regulations and law enforcement to work together. Countermeasures are thereby proposed as follows: strengthening government functions, improving the measures of national cultural copyright protection as soon as possible, and elaborating five forms of copyright protection schemes for the inheritance of national culture.