Yang Xing was scrolling through short dramas earlier this year when a plot stopped her cold: a girl reborn to get even with her sister, who had stolen her college entrance exam scores.

The storyline matched one of Yang’s early web novels, line for line. For a moment, she thought she’d finally caught a break and that her story had been adapted for the screen.

“After checking a few episodes, I knew the drama used whole passages from my novel,” the 28-year-old university teacher from the northwestern city of Xi’an told Sixth Tone.

When she called her editor, the illusion collapsed: no license, no credit, no payment — just profit, for someone else.

On her editor’s advice, Yang began compiling evidence. She built a spreadsheet comparing her novel’s text with screenshots from the show, matching each line of dialogue. The file was sent to the production studio.

Eventually, the studio offered a small payment for the short drama, a fraction of what its online popularity was likely worth. But it never acknowledged copying her work. “If they really don’t think they copied my story,” she said, “why offer compensation at all?”

Across China, web novels like Yang’s are being mined to feed a booming short-drama industry now worth billions. These fast, low-budget serials are filmed in days and released by the dozen, flooding platforms long before regulators can react.

Built for virality, these mini-dramas thrive on speed. Hundreds of small studios race to churn out new titles, often recycling web fiction plots to stay trending. Between 2021 and 2025, roughly 150,000 short dramas were released nationwide, making it nearly impossible to track who owns what.

By the time a copied story surfaces, it’s often been watched by millions and monetized across multiple accounts. Complaints can take months to verify, while studios dissolve and rebrand faster than regulators can respond. And for most authors, the payoff is negligible.

A short novel of about 10,000 Chinese characters might earn just 3,000 yuan ($420) in compensation, Yang said. “If you take a case to court, it can drag on for nearly two years,” she added, requesting a pseudonym to avoid conflicts with her university job. “Most writers give up long before that.”

Amid several high-profile disputes, regulators and platforms are racing to catch up. Some fiction sites have built plagiarism-reporting tools pairing AI scans with human review, while others are testing copyright exchanges that link writers directly with studios. On Zhihu, a leading Q&A platform with a thriving fiction scene, a new marketplace now lets web novels be legally adapted into short dramas.

Industry insiders call these efforts a long-overdue reckoning, a sign that the market may be maturing under pressure. But for writers like Yang, who’ve lost both credit and income to the same system, the right to their own words still feels out of reach.

Copy, profit

Since the early 2000s, serialized web novels have fueled China’s online reading boom, drawing massive audiences to platforms like Jinjiang and Tomato Novel with fast-paced plots and emotionally rich storytelling.

For Yang, they offered a second career. While writing began as a hobby during graduate school, she began writing stories most nights after finishing her university lectures, building a steady side gig with more than 100 titles posted across China’s major fiction platforms.

But with studios racing to feed the short-drama boom, every new web novel is a potential target.

Zhu Guli, content director at a short-drama studio, estimates that at least 70% of short dramas borrow directly from online fiction. “They provide ready-made plots and built-in fan bases,” he said. “For producers, it’s a rich supply of adaptable, market-tested stories.”

And by the time authors realize their stories have been copied, the infringing series has often already gone viral. Most writers only find out by chance, stumbling across it themselves or being alerted by friends who recognize their plots.

“The worst case was earlier this year,” Yang said. “I had to deal with four different short-drama companies at once, each using parts of my work without permission.”

One 45-episode series that lifted her story about her “reborn sister” story racked up a “heat index” of 14 million — the metric used to measure virality on Chinese platforms. A friend in the industry told her that this kind of viewership likely translated into millions of yuan in revenue.

“Once a drama’s heat index passes 10 million, it’s considered a blockbuster,” Yang said. “They make millions from something I created.”

When Yang confronted the studio, it offered her just 5,000 yuan ($703), a so-called “supplementary contract” framed as a profit guarantee after she sent them a spreadsheet documenting every copied line.

Eventually, she received 39,000 yuan in total, half of which went to her publishing platform. “That was an exception,” she said. “Typically, authors like me receive around 3,000 yuan, while short dramas based on our stories can earn hundreds of times that.”

The math of short-drama profits is murky. Studios often reinvest as much as 80 to 85% of their revenue to buy traffic and visibility across multiple platforms, hoping to climb algorithms and attract new viewers.

The biggest players — like Hongguo, a platform backed by TikTok owner ByteDance — can afford to flood feeds with free content, using scale and exposure rather than sales to dominate attention.

Fine print

The problem cuts both ways: even major studios are losing control of the stories they legally license.

Huace Group, a major Chinese production company now expanding into short dramas, recently secured exclusive rights to adapt a popular online novel. But it was only after doing so that they discovered several copycat versions had already circulated online before its production was ready to launch.

“Our exclusivity became meaningless,” said Liu Zifan, head of short-drama operations at Huace, at a copyright protection conference in August. Though Huace eventually won its lawsuit, Liu said the case dragged on for more than two years, with no compensation to date. The long wait and legal costs, she added, have placed significant financial pressure on the company.

In July, leading entertainment company Wajijiwa took down its short drama “Hidden Love for You” after a licensing dispute with online fiction platform Jinjiang, one of the platforms Yang partners with.

Jinjiang had authorized Wajijiwa to produce a full-length TV adaptation of the original novel “Hidden Love,” but said the agreement did not include rights for short-form content. After the dispute drew public attention, Wajijiwa apologized and removed the short drama from all platforms.

With existing legal frameworks struggling to keep pace, both regulators and platforms are now stepping in to close the gap.

The China Copyright Association named micro-drama infringement one of its top copyright issues of 2024, and the upcoming government-backed “Sword Net 2025” campaign will prioritize enforcement against short-drama IP violations, tasking local agencies with investigating high-profile cases.

Meanwhile, fiction platforms like Jinjiang and Tomato Novel have launched plagiarism-reporting systems that combine AI detection with human review in an attempt to protect authors.

Yet with hundreds of thousands of titles to manage, most platforms focus their legal resources on top-performing works, leaving lesser-known writers with little recourse. “It’s a business model legacy from the early web fiction era,” said Zhu.

When platform legal teams do step in, short-drama studios often ignore them, leaving writers with few options.

“Even when we take these cases to court, they can drag on for six months to two years, and the compensation is usually modest,” said Wang Yu, a copyright lawyer at Beijing Yingke Law Firm in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen.

The low cost and high potential profits of online infringement, she added, make some studios willing to risk copying content despite possible legal consequences — often at the author’s expense.

For Yang, the cost became personal. Another unauthorized short-drama version of her story about two sisters and a stolen gaokao score ended up drawing official scrutiny.

In her web novel, a girl is reborn with memories of how her sister betrayed her by swapping their gaokao scores. In her new life, she takes revenge by turning herself in for cheating, forcing her sister to face the consequences instead.

But this short-drama adaptation twisted that storyline, adding scenes of public confrontation with exam officials and turning a private act of revenge into a critique of the education system.

Viewers accused the series of mocking China’s education system, and platforms quickly pulled it offline. And because the script had mirrored her plot so closely, the platform also removed Yang’s original story, erasing months of readership and cutting into her income.

“It’s frustrating,” she said. “They twisted my work, and I’m the one who pays the price.”

Now, Yang has chosen to write from within the system that once stole her stories. She’s learning to craft screenplays for short dramas, where pay can reach 20,000 to 120,000 yuan per project depending on a show’s success.

So far, five of her original scripts have already been turned down. “Producers increasingly favor adapting viral stories over taking chances on new ones,” she said. “The window for original scripts is narrowing.”

Additional reporting: Yang Xinrui; editor: Apurva.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)