Background 出身背景
Technology continues to play a critical role in promoting the success of the 21st century corporate environment across the globe. While in the past businesses depended heavily on advantages such as financial capability and economies of outshine their competitors, the modern world has witnessed a rise in dependency on the evolving technology to achieve comparative advantage. Despite the advantages it offers to businesses across the globe, there a numerous issues that businesses face in the course of using technology to enhance their operations. One of these challenges is the ethical challenges. In this regard, Hofmann (2013) acknowledges that there are numerous issues that arise as far as the development and use of technology is concern, which raises different ethical issues. One of these issues is related to intellectual property rights. Arguably, due to the increased access to information and different technologies, businesses and organisations across the globe face the risk of being accused of intellectual property misuse and violations (Phukan and Dhillon 2002). This report evaluates professional issues and ethics at Tencent with an aim of determining whether one should invest in this company based on its ability to adhere to ethical standards as far as intellectual property rights are concerned.
技术在促进21世纪全球企业环境的成功方面继续发挥着关键作用。过去，企业在很大程度上依赖于财务能力和超越竞争对手的经济等优势，但现代世界越来越依赖不断发展的技术来实现比较优势。尽管它为全球各地的企业提供了诸多优势，但企业在使用技术改进其运营的过程中仍面临许多问题。其中一个挑战是道德挑战。在这方面，Hofmann（2013）承认，就技术的开发和使用而言，存在许多问题，这会引发不同的道德问题。其中一个问题与知识产权有关。可以说，由于获得信息和不同技术的机会增加，全球各地的企业和组织面临被指控滥用和侵犯知识产权的风险（Phukan和Dhillon，2002年）。本报告评估了腾讯的职业问题和道德规范，旨在根据其在知识产权方面遵守道德标准的能力，确定是否应该投资该公司。
Tencent: Intellectual property and ethical issue 腾讯：知识产权与伦理问题
Tencent Holdings Limited, popularly known as Tencent, is one of the leading Chinese internet companies that have its operations both in China and in different parts of the globe. According to its 2017 financial report, this company earned CN¥237.760 billion as revenue (Tencent 2017). The company has investment interests in different areas including mobile technology, artificial intelligence and video gaming. Despite the ethical challenges that arise in the technology industry particular with respect to intellectual property, the company has consistently emphasised that it has implemented measures to not only protect its intellectual property from any form of infringement, but it also ensures that it does not violate third party intellectual property (Tencent 2018). Despite this written commitment to respecting intellectual propeorty, Tencent has been accused a number of time of infringement of other companies’ intellectual property. For example, in between August and September 1999, Tencent, at that time Shenzhen Tengxun Company, was sued by American On Line (AOL) for registering the domain names oicq.com and oicq.net, which had similar initial for AOL’s software, ICQ (Wang and Lim 2004). Tencent lost the case and was forced to transfer the domains for free to AOL.
腾讯控股有限公司，俗称腾讯，是中国领先的互联网公司之一，其业务遍及中国和全球各地。根据其2017年财务报告，该公司的收入为2377.60亿元人民币（腾讯2017年）。该公司在不同领域拥有投资权益，包括移动技术、人工智能和视频游戏。尽管在技术行业，尤其是在知识产权方面出现了道德挑战，但该公司始终强调，其已采取措施，不仅保护其知识产权不受任何形式的侵犯，而且还确保其不侵犯第三方知识产权（腾讯2018）。尽管有尊重知识产权的书面承诺，腾讯仍多次被指控侵犯其他公司的知识产权。例如，1999年8月至9月，当时的深圳腾讯公司被美国在线（AOL）起诉为了注册域名oicq.com和oicq.net，这两个域名的首字母与AOL的软件ICQ（Wang和Lim 2004）相似。腾讯败诉，被迫将域名免费转让给AOL。
Similarly, this company has been accused a couple of times for infringement of copyrighted content. For example, in 2012, Tencent was fined $2,400 by a Chinese court for infringement of music copyrights of on its Soso search engine and QQ IM (Bergsten, Hufbauer and Miner, 2014). In this case, the Music Copyright Society of China accused Tencent of disregarding the music copyrights for years, thus infringing on the intellectual property rights of other content creators. Recently, a video upstart, Douyin, filed a lawsuit against Tencent to compel it to delete an essay posted on its WeChat platform, titled “Douyin, leave the children alone”, and as such, considered harmful to Douyin’s reputation, thus infringing the intellectual property of Douyin’s brand name (Lucas and Feng 2018). This was after Tencent failed to respond to requests by Douyin for Tencent to delete the post.
类似地，腾讯也曾多次因侵犯版权内容而受到指控。例如，2012年，腾讯因侵犯其Soso搜索引擎和QQ IM上的音乐版权而被中国法院罚款2400美元（Bergsten、Hufbauer和Miner，2014年）.在本案中，中国音乐版权协会指控腾讯多年来无视音乐版权，侵犯了其他内容创作者的知识产权。最近，视频新贵窦音对腾讯提起诉讼，要求其删除微信平台上发布的一篇文章，标题为“窦因，别管孩子们”，因此被认为对窦因的声誉有害，从而侵犯了窦因品牌名称的知识产权（Lucas和Feng 2018）。这是因为腾讯未能回应窦因要求腾讯删除该帖子的请求。