Baidu the wildly successful Chinese music search engine is being sued by the Chinese arms of the Usual Suspects. Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and subsidiaries, Cinepoly, Go East and Gold Label have filed a complaint in a Beijing court that the search engine enabled users to find and download mp3 music files.
The search engine has drawn particular fury because it is so easy to use and can ranks music results by category. The company claims to cooperate with copyright owners who prove their status and argues that they merely do what all search engines do and are not themselves involved in any copyright infringement.
The music companies launched this litigation after being emboldened by an earlier Chinese court decision against Chinamp3.com for doing the same thing. In that case the court said that mp3 searching was unlawful.
While the case doesn’t at first blush seem to pose a threat to generalist search engines like Google or Yahoo in principle if it is the linking that is illegal then in reality they too could be under threat. It may also indicate the start of an international strategy of suing specialist music search engines although the precedents are not encouraging in every jurisdiction.
jiuj