Biquge

~ the last words ~

Biquge died in a language I cannot read. It was a Chinese-language pirate library for web novels, the serialized kind that runs to thousands of chapters and gets sold by the chapter on paid platforms. Nothing about that market had a door facing Turkey in 2011, and the closest I ever came to it was noticing how enormous the Chinese piracy enforcement figures were whenever they turned up in English coverage.

The original site opened around 2011, and Chinese sources disagree by a year: the zh.wikipedia article puts it at 2012, a 2025 court report says 2011. Either way it was among the first of its kind. The product itself was almost nothing, a text page with chapter links and no account to make. It scraped novels off the paid platforms and published them for free, and the money came from ad networks rather than from readers.

In July 2018 the Yunlong district branch of the Xuzhou Public Security Bureau took a report that Biquge was infringing copyright, and opened a criminal investigation. The case summary names the site operator only as Li and the man who provided technical support only as Liu, which is standard practice in Chinese case write-ups. Between them they had pulled several hundred thousand yuan out of ad placements. The site was closed during 2019.

The complainant was Yuewen Group, which owns Qidian and most of the paid web-literature business in China. The trade figure for what piracy cost Chinese web literature in 2019 was 5.64 billion yuan for the year. One property alone, Douluo Dalu, was later credited with losses over 510 million yuan.

~ the record ~

~ the court file ~

In October 2019 the Xuzhou Intermediate People's Court convicted both men of copyright infringement. Li received three years, suspended for four, plus a 120,000 yuan fine. Liu received one year, suspended for two, plus 60,000 yuan. The court clawed back 190,000 yuan from Li and 20,000 from Liu. In April 2020 the Jiangsu provincial copyright bureau published the case as one of the ten largest piracy prosecutions in the province for 2019, where it sits between a prosecution over private game servers and one over a WeChat account sharing films off cloud-drive links. Nobody went to prison for any of it.

~ what came after ~

After the shutdown, the founder published the site's source code along with instructions for standing it up. That single act is what separates Biquge from every other closed piracy site. Anybody with a cheap host could put up their own Biquge in an afternoon, and hundreds of people did.

By the time the courts came back to the name in 2025, the count of same-name or variant sites and apps was over a thousand, with sixteen or more of them sitting in the App Store. Chinese publishing ended up with a phrase for the problem: 打不死的笔趣阁, the Biquge that cannot be beaten to death.

~ the name that outlived the site ~

On 24 October 2025 the Beijing High People's Court issued a final judgment invalidating the Biquge trademark, which somebody had gone and registered. The reasoning was that a mark tied this closely to the online-literature field, carrying that history, damaged copyright management order and the public interest badly enough that it could not stand as a registration.

Search the name today and you get plenty of results. None of them are the site that was prosecuted in Xuzhou. Biquge stopped being a website somewhere in 2019 and became a category label, the way people say a Napster rather than the Napster.

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