Charges filed against network operators and put on the agenda of people's courts have been on the rise in Beijing and these seem to initiate an eventful year for an increased number of network operators to fight in a tangle of lawsuits in the capital this year,according to today's People's Daily.

Beijing Second Intermediate Court recently oversaw the lawsuit in which Yang Jian sued six network operators including Netbig£¨China £© Com. Ltd. Beijing Branch, Zhaodaola Internet£¨China £© Com. Ltd. and Beijing 21dnn News Network Com. Ltd. for their infringement on the copyrights of his works. Before accepting the lawsuit, the court has handled several others such as the case of MP3, the domain case of "Ikea" and "Viagra", and Capital Online. Still, there was also a court session held on unfair competition in which the suing party asked for protection of its domain name as an object for independent rights and interests.

In recent two years, with the spread of the Internet and a rapid development of network technology, lawsuits against networks increased. Take Beijing Second Intermediate Court for example, it handled only one network case in 1998. But six were reported in 1999 and 16 in 2000.

Against these it has come to handle 22 up to March 8 this year. The lawsuits concern mainly disputes over copyrights of network works, trademarks, unfair competition, domain name registration, etc. The problems focus on£º digitizing and uploading other people's work without permission £» linking to the MP3 music online for downloading, violating online domain names, unfair competition on the Internet and protecting domain names in Chinese, etc.