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Digital Legal
Baidu beat record companies in Chinese courts
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 27 January 2010
Chinese search engine Baidu has won its legal dispute with a number of mainly Western record companies; a blow for the music industry, which felt it had won the upper hand in this battle in more recent years, in part thanks to revisions to China’s copyright laws.
As much previously reported, the record companies accuse Baidu of infringing its copyrights by having a special MP3 search facility which provides users with links directly to music files, most of them linking to unlicensed content. Baidu claimed, as most search engines accused of copyright infringement do, that they don’t host any infringing content themselves and can’t be held liable for infringement merely by linking to unlicensed sources of music. The labels countered that the Baidu MP3 search had been specifically set up to search for illegal content, and made no effort to filter out unlicensed music, mainly because it had proven to be such a popular service among Chinese web users.
An investigation by UK IT website The Register also claimed that Baidu was more proactively involved in the provision of unlicensed content than it said, with large quantities of the unlicensed content linked to by the search service not accessible via any other route on the web.
Baidu had already fought off one legal challenge by the record companies through the Chinese courts, but following the aforementioned revisions to the country’s copyright laws, revisions which proved helpful to the music companies in a similar case against a similar service operated by Yahoo! China, they had a second go in early 2008. It is that litigation that has now been defeated in the Beijing courts. A similar case against another search service called Sohu also failed.
Responding to the rulings, the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry said in a statement yesterday: “The judgments in the Baidu and Sohu cases are extremely disappointing, and we are considering our next steps. The verdicts do not reflect the reality that both operators have built their music search businesses on the basis of facilitating mass copyright infringement, to the detriment of artists, producers and all those involved in China’s legitimate music market”.
