Music Industry Tells Advertisers to Boycott "Pirate" Baidu

An anonymous reader points to a story at PC Authority, which begins: "Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu, China's largest search engine, because they believe it is encouraging music piracy. Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China, according to the representatives, who describe the company as 'incorrigible.' The Chinese firm's music search engine is accessed through what is described as a prominent link on the company's home page."

Comments

Don't all search engines do this?

[hostyle]

http://www.google.com/search?q=prince+mp3+%22index+of%22

Re:Don't all search engines do this?

[ironfrost]

But Google doesn't set up a page with links to searches like that for the top 500 tracks (as well as other selections by genre) and link to that page from their homepage.

Re:How Do I Submit My Tracks?

[SensiMillia]

I'm living in Beijing and, as far as I can find out, there is not much censorship on music (most Chinese can not understand English lyrics anyway).

Unfortunatly the selection of music sold is quite limited. The recent hit parade and old time classics are readily available in the CD shops or on the street. (all are copies, legal CD's are very hard to come by)

But then again, you are able to find just about everything on the internet. Ting (Mandarin chinese for 'to hear') is one of the better MP3 sites, indexing thousands of MP3's in a wide range of styles which can be freely listened to online.
(http://www.ting-mp3.com)

Re:cool.

[sticks_us]

Opportunist: in some areas (South America? Africa?) copying is so widespread that artists can't really make a living off their music

It's that way in most of the world, really. I'd bet 99% of all musicians don't make a living off their music; they may look cool when they're playing in their bar band on Saturday night, but they're right back in the cubicle (or fishing boat, depending on your profession) with the rest of us on Monday.

We see and read about the rich musicians at the very top all the time, but they're a miniscule fraction of the entire music playing populace. It's obvious that the organizations responsible for all the copyright bruhaha are interested in protecting those few moneymakers at the top of the pile.

psychodelicacy: Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity

This is a good point. The definition of plagiarism is subjective and like all things settled by litigation, usually favors the people with the most expensive lawyers (i.e. the top media/communications companies). It's been that way in pop music forever (a few good examples can be found in the book, Confessions of a Record Producer) -- one only has to look at the R&B (Black) music scene in the 1950s-70s to see how many ideas were illegally swiped and resold by people like Pat Boone.