Baidu Won Music Copyright Lawsuit

BEIJING, Dec 26, 2007 (SinoCast China IT Watch via COMTEX) -- BIDU | charts | news | PowerRating -- Baidu.com, the largest Chinese Internet search service provider, finally won the long- drawn lawsuit with five multinational record companies.

The local court in Beijing ruled that the music download service offered by Baidu.com was legal and the Chinese search website did not have to pay any compensation because there was no infringement of copyrights in its music contents.

In July 2005, seven label companies including EMI Music and Warner Music filed the lawsuit against Baidu.com for infringement of their music copyrights. They said that a lot of search result pages of Baidu.com were linked to unauthorized MP3 download addresses.

Baidu.com successively won the first and second round of trial. Baidu.com had been insisting that the responsibility lied in websites that provided the illegal music download links.

In January this year, Baidu and EMI inked a strategic partnership over online music streaming and download services in China, providing a reference of the way of cooperation between Internet and record sectors, but that cannot thoroughly solve the music copyright-related issues when searching and downloading MP3 music at an Internet portal.

Based on their cooperation agreements, Baidu got the authorization to stream EMI Music's Chinese repertoire on its music search channel, and in return, EMI Music, the world's largest independent music company, will share the revenues generated by the advertising at the channel.

Besides, the two companies have agreed to explore and develop advertising-supported music download services provided for users for free, and Baidu will set up a special EMI Music Zone in its music search channel, which will legally stream all of EMI's Chinese repertoire.

However, Baidu and EMI are still facing many challenges to the success of their cooperation mode.

Baidu needs to continue improving its present music search services, and to explore other modes of commercial cooperation with other music companies, to establish a win-win industrial chain structure via diversified partnership.

For the domestic record sector, although it is now facing visible shocks from both the Internet and the wireless fields, it still should be positive towards the development of the digital music, and should take search engine an important marketing channel to increase its own earnings while maintaining the interests of copyright holders.

In addition, an authoritative third-party supervisor is necessary to ensure the fairness of sharing the revenues; otherwise it would harm the partnership among Internet companies and music companies, Analysys said.

From dycj.ynet.com, Page 1, Tuesday, December 25, 2007 info@SinoCast.com

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