Chinese music industry group sues Baidu over infringement
Baidu.com, the top Chinese search engine, gets lots of its traffic from a service that tracks and links to MP3s, most of which are illegally posted. Now a Chinese music industry group is suing the site over alleged copyright violation.
The AP reports:
Music Copyright Society official Qu Jingming said in a statement posted on the society's Web site Friday that Baidu.com provided "music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its Web site without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits."
The copyright society said its lawsuit, filed in a Beijing court in January, claims Baidu used 50 songs illegally and demands compensation. The alleged piracy forced legitimate online-music providers to shut down, the industry group said.
This comes at a time when Google, which is hoping to catch up to Baidu in the Chinese market, is working with record companies to provide legal links to music for searchers.
Formerly a journalist and consultant in Beijing, Graham Webster is a graduate student studying East Asia at Harvard University. At Sinobyte, he follows the effects of technology on Chinese politics, the environment, and global affairs. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
Your racist and Sinophobic comment shows both your lack of knowledge about Baidu and the Chinese Internet search market in general. Please do a search on Shanghaiist.com to see that the courts have thrown out these most recent attempt to discredit Baidu.
@Mr. Webster:
I am an online advertiser living and working in Guangzhou. I am a big fan of Baidu for a number of reasons:
1. They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
2. They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent's traffic.
3.They have advertising solutions that can be tailored--as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
4. They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
5. They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
6. Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
7.They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you'd only take less than 8% of their market share...
8. They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don't have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me....
9. They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases....
Most of all I like the people there. I find them honest, enthusiastic and approachable. They hurt when some of the ethnocentric crap dished out by the western media portrays them in a bad light regarding problems they want resolved as much as anyone...
They have their finger on the pulse of what China wants and needs and they know best how to access their own market. And they have not been afraid to admit (unlike the crazy spin on issues from the likes of Google) when they don't know something or when they have an issue to resolve...
Enough for now...Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number...
David DeGeest
Director of Social Networking and Analytics, Culture Fish Media
I would also like to correct myself if I was incorrect in reporting that most of the Baidu mp3s are unauthorized. I am specifically curious about your assertion that removing the controversial files would represent an 8 percent impact in market share. If you happen to check back here, please drop me a line at sinobyte at gwbstr dot com.
Graham Webster
- by amaxxx March 8, 2008 10:24 PM PST
- Graham, I don't think you need to correct yourself - most of Baidu mp3s are unauthorized.
- Reply to this comment
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(4 Comments)Baidu is well aware that their mp3 search has been critical to their success and to publicly reduce their liability, they have been propagating the fact that mp3 search contributes only a low traffic % of their overall traffic, and conveniently quote unreliable Alexa figures. Indendent research (including CNNIC) shows that it is pretty substantial. Mp3 search is the main reason for Baidu's strength in China and that it has been the cornerstone of their dominance in China. Granted that they have been smart enough to build on it and offer other attractive services as listed above.
However, the fact remains that in all probability Baidu's mp3 'search' is as dirty as they come. Recent reports in Chinese publications have been highlighting the fact that a vast majority of Baidu's music search links are to anonymous 3rd party sites that some say are propped up by Baidu itself. Pretty damning developments and certainly worthy of further nvestigation - this seems to provide a logical explanation on why Baidu's music search service is quite a hit with users, as the music files are always guaranteed to come up as link. It's almost like a localized search for music of a finite number of conveniently placed servers!
DeGeest is entitled to his opinion that Baidu staff are "honest, enthusiastic and approachable" but I do think that on the honesty front, their mp3 shenanigans show them up to be dishonest and cunningly hiding behind the guise of being just a 'search' engine. As to them being "enthusiastic and approachable", it is obvious that it is more of a reproach to Google's stand-offish and probably arrogant/ aloof attitude in China, and credit to Baidu for seizing their opportunities.