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Music Giants Sue Baidu Over Music Downloads
chengee writes "Music giants Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and their local subsidiaries are suing Chinese search engine Baidu for allegedly infringing the copyright of hundreds of songs, a press report said Friday. Looks like the party is going to be over for Chinese downloaders. But more importantly how will this lawsuit turn out in a place known for its lax copyright laws?"
Welcome to China.
Where you can walk down the street and buy hundreds of western media, IP, software and music products from corner pirate bootleggers, and nobody bats an eyelash.
But if you want to start a search engine that might help people find resources online, well, that won't be stood for. People might use that to "pirate" things.
This perfectly encapsulates the spirit of modern China: The capitalistic freedoms to lie, cheat and steal, but not the humanist freedoms to speak, organize and share information.
Give credit where credit is due. No country ever respected treaties they could infringe without fear of punishment, if they had something to gain from it.
It's just a fact of history: the signature on a treaty is no stronger than the signing arm.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
"From the copyright point of view, we think differently than the music companies. Baidu is just a platform for music search," Liang said.
Why aren't they suing Google as well? Google makes it possible to find copyrighted material? Of course one could use a search engine to find the people who are providing illegal copies and sue them.Bradley Holt
Seems rather subjective to me. I mean, granted -- I'm no expert on China's copyright laws (but I can pretend if you'd like since this IS /.) but are their laws really lax or is the submitter just so used to his own laws that they SEEM lax. Personally, I find much of US copyright law overly restrictive and biased toward corporations.
Additionally, I don't know if laws can even be lax. Seems like it's the enforcement that should be called lax rather then the law. After all, the laws DEFINE what's legal. Perhaps lenient would be a better word?
It's just a fact of history: the signature on a treaty is no stronger than the signing arm.
Which is exactly why the US completely disregards NAFTA - the framework they themselves helped build.
They only apply NAFTA as it suits them, not the other way around. The US is no different than China IMO.
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But with the looming US debt owed to China, how long before they say, "No, Yankee, we don't feel like it. What are you going to do about it" and grin the grin of one who knows they hold the other by the short hairs?
It is a two way street and will be for quite some time. China buys a lot of US bonds. But the US is China's largest market by far and for the forseeable future. They need the US to keep buying from them (remember the whole brohaha over most-favored-nation trading status). Additionally, China has a couple of looming problems - the double-digit economic growth rates are unstustainble for the long run, their economy will slow, at which point they will need the US market even more. Secondly, the one-child policy has produced a major age inversion - it is going to get harder to support the aging population with less able-bodied people entering the workforce than are retiring from it.
Over the past year, China has made a show of cracking down on flagrant IP violators. My impression (and that's all it is, an impression) is that big crackdowns have had no long-term effects on the 'market' as a whole.
This case is different in that Baidu is in the top-5 websites with the most page-hits in all of the world, I suspect that the Chinese goverment has "pride" in Baidu and a big punishment would be considered a loss of face. But, big show-punishments seems to be how they've handled similar complaints recently. So there is probably some level of internal conflict here. Just my occidental analysis of the situation.
And yet Google isn't [overvalued]?
Not the way Baidu is, see this analysis.