<正>Theoretically,copyright and censorship regulate different aspects of information products. Copyright grants authors exclusive right to their expressions for the purpose of encouraging creation,while censorship suppresses the dissemination of certain ideas by filtering out expressions.The mainstream view in the West holds that copyright is in harmony with freedom of expression.First,copyright contributes to democratic discourse in providing rights that enable independent writers and artists to make a living from their expression.Second,copyright protects expressions but not ideas.Other authors are always free to express the same idea or reuse the information in a protected work in a different way than the first author.In this way,private censorship is avoided.Third,the fair use doctrine of copyright law prevents authors from censoring the content they disapprove.Nonetheless,the reality is much murkier than the seemingly clear-cut dichotomy of expression vs.idea.Many critical legal scholars have suggested that copyright could be a means of suppressing rather than promoting freedom of expression,that is,as a form of private censorship.This tension presents itself in an even more interesting way in the Chinese context,given the government’s tight control of information.