Techdirt. Stories about "baidu"

Game Developers Sue Baidu Over Links To Infringing Content

Zachary Knight — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:06:15 PST

In the latest round of content providers being unable to tell the difference between a link and infringing content, a Chinese game developers group, Content Provider Union (CPU), is suing the Chinese search engine Baidu for copyright infringement. CPU claims that Baidu has provided over 350 games for download and is liable for over $4.7 million in damages. In its defense, Baidu claims that it only provides links to 3rd party websites that actually provide the game downloads and is not liable for infringement that occurs at those sites.

This type of lawsuit is really nothing new for Baidu as it has been sued in the past and prevailed in court. Those court rulings stated that merely linking to infringing content was not enough to be held liable for infringement. Why these game developers think the outcome will be any different is anyone's guess. Perhaps these game developers should look to the music industry for some tips on what should be done. After losing repeatedly to Baidu in court, three major labels decided it would be better to enter a licensing deal with Baidu. I guess those labels realized that if people were using Baidu to find music, it would be better for those fans to be pointed to legal alternatives rather than infringing services. The same could work for game developers. If they were to partner with Baidu to offer a licensed game store or download service, those people who use Baidu to find games would be able to get them directly from the developers. That is a win for everyone. Let's hope that these game developers don't enter into the same vicious six year cycle the music industry went through.

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Labels Finally Realize It's Better To License Music To Baidu Than To Fight It

Mike Masnick — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 06:13:00 PDT

We've been following the record labels fight with Chinese search engine giant Baidu since it began in 2005. The labels kept claiming that Baidu was infringing on their copyrights by helping people find music. And while there were some questions about just how deeply involved Baidu was (including accusations that it didn't just link to mp3s, but may have hosted them knowingly as well), the company kept winning in court.

It appears that three of the big four record labels have finally realized, six years later, that rather than continuing to fight this fight, it's better to license the music and be done with it. An organization representing Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music has agreed to license their music to Baidu, who will make it available as a part of a licensed service. It'll be interesting to see if there are any crazy restrictions on this, but kudos to those three record labels for finally (way too late) realizing that this was always a business model issue, not a legal problem.

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Chinese Gov't Promises (Again) To Punish Baidu For Music Downloads... Despite Baidu Winning In Court

Mike Masnick — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:56:49 PDT

Ah, Baidu. Back in 2005, we discussed how the company's main reason for success as a search engine was in its music download efforts, and wondered if its planned IPO would force it to curtail searches for music downloads. Since then, there have been a series of lawsuits against Baidu... but (somewhat surprisingly) the company won in court. Of course, that didn't stop the recording industry from still demanding that Baidu ignore the court ruling.

Well, now the Chinese government is getting involved, and insists that it's going to punish Baidu for its music download services. There still remain some questions about how involved Baidu really is in the music downloads (i.e., research suggested that it was actively involved in hosting the files and regularly hiding them in new -- but easily findable by Baidu -- places every time a takedown was issued). However, we have seen this game before. The Chinese government has slapped Baidu on the wrist in 2008 and in 2009 for similar or related issues, but never really did much. I'm guessing that once again this is more of a PR move to satisfy US diplomatic pressures.

Of course, even odder is that beyond the fact that the government is going to sanction Baidu despite it winning its court case, the article notes that Baidu has actually "reached an agreement with the Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC) to pay fees to the MCSC for every song downloaded using Baidu." That certainly suggests that Baidu has figured out a way to go legit... so why announce punishment now?

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Recording Industry To Baidu: Look, We know You Beat Us In Court, But Just Do What We Want Anyway, Mmkay?

Timothy Geigner — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:31:00 PDT

Let me tell you a story. I come from a home of two children and I'm the oldest of two boys. One day, my mother made chocolate eclairs. Quickly, of course, because my father eats like a bear that's had its stomach pumped, we were down to the final eclair. My brother insisted he should get the last eclair. I reminded him that I'm roughly twice his size and could take the damn eclair anytime I felt like it. My mother, in her esteemed fairness, gave the eclair to my brother.

That woman always hated me.

In any case, I proceeded to corner my little brother as he held onto his sweet chocolate and pudding prize, and explained to him that it would be better for everyone if he just ignored Judge Mother's ruling and gave me the eclair instead. All manner of good things would follow, I insisted. And do you know what that little ginger-haired jerk did? He smiled at me, patted me on the shoulder, and shoved every last ounce of that 8 inch eclair into his mouth, rolling his eyes in exaggerated pleasure as he did so.

Witness the collective music industry reacting to their sound defeat in Chinese Court while accusing Baidu and Sohu of copyright infringement for indexing links to MP3 files. Now, there's been some likely fair concern that Baidu may be hiding some actual hosting of infringing files, but the music labels apparently didn't come close to proving that in court as it seems the main issue discussed in the trial was their linking to infringing files. But the point is they lost. The judge, like my tyrantess of a mother, raised Baidu's arm and pronounced them the victors.

And so the collective music industry has gone to the Financial Times (found via PaidContent.org) to basically ask Baidu to ignore the ruling and do what they ask anyway because of all the great and wonderful things that will come once they do. They're basically pulling my routine after I lost my delicious eclair, but their letters offer up some wonderful doozies:

"This is a country with twice as many internet users as the US, but where legitimate music consumption is miniscule, with digital revenues per user at less than 1% of the US equivalent."

Damn Chinese people, always refusing to spend as much as Americans on music. Nevermind the cultural differences that may be coming into play here. Nevermind that the nominal GDP for the United States is some thirteen times that of China. We want the Chinese to pay as much for their music as Americans, damn it, and the way to do that is to get Baidu to voluntarily limit their own search results. And that's exactly what the Financial Times letter indicates:

"Baidu is the biggest source of this problem, with its MP3 music search service estimated to be responsible for over 50% of infringing music distribution in China. It has the means to bring immediate change by proactively filtering infringing works from this service."

So, you see, if Baidu would just filter out the infringing content, relatively poor Chinese citizens would suddenly spend big bucks for music. And perhaps Ferraris. Ooooh, and those sweet 100 ft. yachts I'm sure they'd all like to actually pay for if they had any damn money!

My brother didn't have any money either, but he had his chocolate eclair, so he told me shove my request in places that usually only pornstars put things. I expect Baidu will respond in similar fashion.

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Baidu Wins Again; Chinese Court Finds No Copyright Infringement In Linking To Music

Mike Masnick — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:59:00 PST

One of the biggest reasons why Baidu has been so popular in China is because it helps people find music to download. Of course, it mostly finds unauthorized tracks, and once Baidu became a public company, the lawsuits quickly followed. Baidu won, but the record labels/IFPI sued again. However, once again, it appears to be for naught, as a court has ruled in favor of Baidu, saying that just linking to infringing content isn't infringing itself, and pointing out that the IFPI failed to point to a specific site that was actually hosting the infringing content. While I think that the basic reasoning behind the ruling (just linking to infringing content shouldn't be considered infringing) makes sense, there actually is a fair amount of evidence that Baidu is a lot more involved in actually hosting and hiding the content itself. Of course, you also have to wonder how much the fact that Baidu is a Chinese company, and the IFPI represents foreign labels, played into the way this has turned out. Perhaps the IFPI could take a page from Google's book and "leave" China as well.

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Court Says Just Because Baidu Is Listed On NASDAQ, Doesn't Mean It Can Be Sued For Copyright Infringement In The US

Mike Masnick — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:50:26 PST

China's largest search engine, Baidu, has had a reputation from very early on as being a source for downloading infringing music and movies. In fact, in 2005 when the company went public, many in China claimed that the availability of music and movies was why Baidu was so popular. In fact, we wondered if by going public, it would put pressure on the company to block those links. Later evidence suggested that Baidu was heavily involved in promoting unauthorized content (potentially even hosting it itself). And while the company has promised to remove links, they seem to reappear almost immediately (and only indexed by Baidu). Not surprisingly, Baidu has been sued many times for copyright infringement.

However, one such case, brought in the US was recently dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. The plaintiff claimed that Baidu could be sued in the US because it was listed on NASDAQ, but the court found nothing to support that and dismissed the entire complaint.

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Internet Companies Apologize To China For Being Too Good

Mike Masnick — Fri, 9 Jan 2009 17:29:00 PST

We noted that the Chinese government had called out a bunch of search engines for allowing access to porn recently, and I find it amusing to see that pretty much all of the search engines called out have issued apologies. What I'm wondering is exactly what are they apologizing for? The fact that other people put pornography online? The fact that they're too good as search engines and are able to find that content?

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China Adds Search Engines To Its Censorship-By-Guilt Plan; How Will Google Respond?

Mike Masnick — Mon, 5 Jan 2009 15:39:00 PST

It's well known that the Great Firewall censorship brigade in China employs tens of thousands of people monitoring what's said across the internet -- but perhaps far more effective has been the fear factor imposed on various ISPs by the government threatening them with punishment, if they don't ban unacceptable content. Of course, the government doesn't define what exactly is unacceptable, leading the ISPs to over-ban in order to protect themselves. Mostly, this effort has focused on internet access providers, but it looks like the government is now expanding it to search engines as well, after the government publicly named and shamed both Google and Baidu for failing to prevent access to "undesirable" content such as pornography.

This may prove to be an interesting test for Google, which was widely criticized for its original move into China, whereby it agreed to block content as designated by the Chinese government -- while alerting users to the fact that the content is blocked. That was Google's way of striking a compromise, while trying to call attention to the censorship (perhaps in the hope that it would eventually cause the policy to be changed). However, if Google is now getting pressure to be more proactive in determining what's "unacceptable," rather than just blocking specific content designated by the government, things could get a lot trickier for Google. Of course, some might point out that this was the slippery slope that Google put itself on when it first made the deal to get into China.

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

Mike Masnick — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:26:59 PST

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.

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Baidu Expose Suggests That It's A Lot More Involved In Music Downloads Than It Lets On

Mike Masnick — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:48:00 PDT

More than three years ago, when Chinese search engine Baidu first filed to go public, we noted that it's huge advantage over Google in China appeared to stem from its very popular music download search engine -- and we wondered if going public would force that to go away, potentially damaging the company's bottom line significantly. In fact, we were surprised that it appeared that the investors in the site hadn't done much due diligence to understand what was going on. The recording industry wasted little time in suing Baidu. While Baidu won the first case on a technicality and quickly sued again.

At first, this did seem like a typical situation seen with other online search engines, such as The Pirate Bay or even Google, where it's not really clear how Baidu could stop the searches for unauthorized music. However, a new investigative report by The Register found evidence that suggests Baidu is actually a lot more involved in the music download business than it lets on. Specifically, the search results mostly link to a mysterious network of sites that are only reachable via Baidu searches. You can't just go to the sites directly. The sites themselves have a long (and potentially growing) list of random domain names such that the songs constantly move around, and any time Baidu receives a "takedown" it can claim it complied, while the music almost immediately shows back up on the next domain in the list. Also, Baidu almost never links to other, legitimate, download sites -- preferring to point people to these sites that are unreachable outside of Baidu instead.

All in all, it certainly sounds like Baidu is a lot more involved in providing the actual downloads than it would as just a search engine.

That said, The Register's report includes a variety of unsupported statements about how this has "destroyed" economic activity in the music business. As we've seen, the music business has actually adapted to the expectation that the music itself is free in China. I recognize that it's popular for the RIAA and IFPI to make claims about how downloading is destroying the music industry, but you would think that the Register would know better.

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Chinese Gov't Scolds Baidu For Not Doing The Impossible

Mike Masnick — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:53:43 PST

Over the last few weeks, there's been a big scandal in Hong Kong concerning photos of certain celebrities caught in various states of undress and various "adult" activities. The police in Hong Kong have had some trouble dealing with this, apparently first claiming that anyone possessing these images was breaking the law and then bungling an investigation into who leaked the images. Now, to top that off, the Chinese government is "censuring" the popular search engine Baidu for allowing people to find these controversial images. It's not entirely clear how the government expects Baidu to simply know that these pictures are illegal and to stop people from finding them, but as we've seen, that's the method by which the Chinese government enforces its censorship -- not by explicitly stating what needs to be banned, but by telling search engines and ISPs that they'll get in trouble if they allow anything "bad" to get through. That leads to aggressively blocking anything that the ISPs or search engines feel might get them in trouble. Of course, to make that work, the government occasionally does need to publicly scold some of the firms for failing, even in doing the impossible, as that gives increased motivation for everyone else to just keep on blocking stuff.

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Record Labels Keep On Trying: Sue Baidu For Copyright Infringement Yet Again

Mike Masnick — Tue, 5 Feb 2008 12:27:00 PST

Back in December, Alibaba, the Chinese search engine also known as Yahoo China, lost a lawsuit from the recording industry, claiming that the search engine facilitated the downloading of unauthorized content. It's no secret that part of the reason why Alibaba and Baidu have been able to succeed in China is that they're pretty blatant in helping people find content to download. What was strange, though, was at the same time that Yahoo/Alibaba was found guilty, Baidu was found not guilty of copyright infringement, upholding an earlier decision. However, despite having lost the case, it appears that the major record labels have simply turned around and sued Baidu yet again for copyright infringement. Unfortunately, the Reuters writeup doesn't get into the history of the earlier cases (one of which ended just over a month ago) to explain why the labels can simply turn around and sue again, despite having just lost a nearly identical case.

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Yahoo China Found Guilty Of Copyright Infringement For Linking To MP3s

Mike Masnick — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:41:24 PST

A while back, we had pointed out that the success of a few Chinese search engines wasn't necessarily that they were any better than their counterparts -- but that because they were pretty explicit in helping people find downloadable music. Baidu was famous for this -- and we wondered if the company's move to go public would force a crackdown on such activities. Indeed, soon after Baidu went public in the US, it got sued. However, eventually the courts found that it was not guilty -- but because of the way the copyright laws were worded. Simple solution: a little pressure from the recording industry and... voila: new laws. So, with those new copyright laws in place, the IFPI went after Alibaba, who also happens to run Yahoo China. And, with those new laws in place, Alibaba has now been found guilty of copyright infringement for providing easy to find links to downloadable music (not hosting the music, just linking to it). Not surprisingly, the recording industry pulls out its favorite adjective, calling the win "significant." Given all of these "significant" wins, and the fact that the recording industry's future keeps getting bleaker and bleaker, while file sharing (and the rest of the music industry) continues to grow, I'm beginning to think that the industry maybe does not really know what that word means.

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