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(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Mon, Nov 10th 2008 4:26am




Filed Under:
bittorrent, china, file sharing, great firewall

Companies:
baidu, isohunt, mininova, pirate bay


China Says: If You Must Infringe On Copyrights, Use Baidu

from the interesting-strategy dept

Many people have noted over the years that with all of the effort that China has put into its Great Firewall, the country hasn't done much of anything to crack down on unauthorized file sharing. In fact, at times, it's almost seemed to encourage it. So some people were a bit surprised to find out that China's censors tried blocking traffic to various well known BitTorrent sites, such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay. However, what may be most interesting is that rather than blocking them outright, it appears that the system just redirects all that traffic to popular Chinese search engine Baidu.

This would be the same Baidu that first became really popular when China shifted all Google traffic to its site, and also the site that stayed popular because it made it easy to download unauthorized music. This would be the same Baidu that was also recently exposed to be fairly complicit in the music downloads it offers, potentially hosting the content itself through a revolving series of ever-changing domains. So, this hardly seems like an attempt by the Chinese government to crack down on unauthorized file sharing -- but an attempt to drive it all to a local company. It looks like the redirects only lasted for a few days, and are no longer in place -- but if the past is any indication, those redirects may come back at any time.

6 Comments | Leave a Comment

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  1.  
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Nov 10th, 2008 @ 5:39am

    China is weird.

    I vaguely can sense an attempt to undermine the rest of the world so they can move in for domination, but it seems to lack the necessary focus to pull it off.

    No nation can ever go fully insular, though I suppose the Forbidden Palace is one such instance where it has happened before. And oh look, same region.....

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  
    identicon
    Seatec, Nov 10th, 2008 @ 5:49am

    China probably injected subliminal messeges in to he music.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  
    identicon
    Life is Colourful, Nov 10th, 2008 @ 5:58am

    Interesting Strategy

    Sounds like an interesting plan to promote local companies. China is famous for that anyways.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Nov 10th, 2008 @ 9:23am

    china wouldn't be the 1st country to promote local business' at the expense of foreign one.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  
    identicon
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Nov 10th, 2008 @ 1:39pm

    History Repeats Or Not?

    In the 19th century, the US considered itself a developing country, and refused to acknowledge copyrights of works from other countries. Well-known cases of works pirated in the US were those of Charles Dickens and George Méliès.

    Today, China is at a similar level of development to the 19th-century USA. Yet the US refuses to let it have the same rights.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  6.  
    icon
    sprearson81 (profile), Jun 10th, 2012 @ 9:16am

    Fair play to China on this one.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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