Despite being found not guilty in a previous case, China’s most used Internet search site Baidu is in legal trouble again.
Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and Warner Music Group have all sued the site again over illegal music downloads, deeming it a winnable cause after last month’s ruling against Yahoo China. The companies are being represented by the IFPI which noted that the record companies had also sued Sohu.com, China’s third largest Internet portal.
The IFPI has stated that China’s market of legally distributed music files is a minuscule $76 million USD, less than 1 percent of the global market.
“It’s a matter of great regret that, despite the clear precedent laid down by the Yahoo China judgment, those Internet companies are instead choosing blatant violation of copyright” and the litigation that accompanies it, said John Kennedy, CEO of the IFPI.
Result for: legal trouble
The giant Chinese search engine Baidu has been sued again, this time by a local music industry group, marking the second time in the last month that the search engine finds itself in legal trouble.
The Music Copyright Society of China and one of its officials, Qu Jingming accuse Baidu of “providing 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 group goes as far as to say that Baidu’s piracy led to the shut down of many up and coming legal online music providers. The group filed the suit in Bejing Court yesterday and alleges that 50 songs were illegally traded. The group wants monetary compensation.
Updates as they become available.
Result for: legal trouble
IsoHunt, the public torrent site currently in legal trouble with the MPAA, has announced that it has made a new partnership with Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo and will offer over 10,000 free and authorized albums on the site.
Despite coming under attack from the MPAA in 2006, IsoHunt has refused to shut the site down and continues to add features to the site. The main feature is the continued addition of Creative Commons licensed content. All CC media is free to be shared and licensed by its creator. The most notable use of CC recently is Nine Inch Nails releasing their Ghosts album earlier this year, for free, using a CC license.
Jamendo is a site that indexes Creative Commons licensed music and just recently hit 10,000 albums available. Adds Laurent Kratz, CEO of Jamendo, “Jamendo uses the Creative Commons licensing scheme to keep the rules very straight forward : copy as much as you can eat, the artist, the right-holders are ok. The new thing about partnering with a torrent portal like isoHunt, is that Jamendo has started an editorial work on top.”” Kratz added. “In order to maximize the interest of millions using torrent search engines every day, it was critical to only highlight a subset of all the albums we receive every day. It’s not about discriminating one band from another, it’s about getting anonymous BitTorrent fans to Jamendo, and discovering unsigned bands from everywhere in the world.”
“We receive up to 500 new albums per week, from more than 60 countries in the world,
