Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Yahoo! Slammed Over Piracy By Chinese Court

Posted by Zonk on from the dangerous-precedent dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Setting a precedent likely to have far-ranging consequences, a Chinese court has once again lambasted Yahoo! China over piracy concerns. The search firm is (according to the court) infringing on intellectual property rights by allowing copyrighted materials to be downloaded from the internet via search results. 'John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, or IFPI, said in a statement Thursday. "By confirming that Yahoo China's service violates copyright under new Chinese laws, the Beijing court has effectively set the standard for Internet companies throughout the country."'"

5 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. No surprises by superbus1929 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yahoo earned this. They bent over backwards to do business with China, and now they're paying the karmic price. Personally, after what they did to those journalists and bloggers, I love it.

    --
    Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
  2. Hmm... by snarfies · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hm, gee, I wonder if this same impossible standard will be applied to non-foreign companies in China.

    My guess is "no."

  3. Selective Enforcement by corby · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is great news. I predict this law will end all copyright violations of photographs of the Tiananmen Square protests.

  4. Re:OH NOZ! by purpledinoz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Talk about calling the kettle black. China is probably the largest source of piracy. They really should handle the problem of people selling pirate CDs and DVDs before going after Yahoo for indexing some warez site.

  5. Re:OH NOZ! by daninbusiness · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's also telling/glaring that Baidu.com is not being held to the same standards. That site even has a specialized mp3 search on it - http://mp3.baidu.com/.


    Large governments do tend to engage in nationalistic hypocracy, however, so I guess this shouldn't be terribly surprising.