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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."
Didn't know about this until today, thanks RIAA! Seems you're doing more to help piracy than hurt it. Bash the (pretty f'ing bad comparably) napster, which lead eventually to the better protocols today, without which wider scale piracy wouldn't even be able to the masses! Then you give these mediums free advertising by screaming about how easy it is to get what you want to hear without dealing with extortion rate pricing. (Yeah yeah news groups, xdcc, etc... but your average joe can handle a torrent a lot easier than that)
Am thoroughly disgusted by the illegal activities of these music companies and their hypocrisy.
Sony infected many computers with a dangerous trojan, which would have sent any hacker to 40 years in Prison, and they escaped conviction or even a fine.
RIAA has been ruled against many times in court and ordered to pay lawyers fees to a poor single mom, and still they are loose: No arrest, no seizure of their equipment, etc.
MediaSentry and other RIAA hackers violate state laws in Montana, California, Texas and a host of states and yet continue to operate even though they are illegal. None has been sued yet and their findings are valid in a court of law: Its like a thief acting as a witness to a houseowner against another thief.
RIAA would be happy if the whole internet shut down tomorrow but they still can produce music at zero cost and sell it for $29.99 an album.
The Baidu search engine should show its middle finger publicly at RIAA and also sue them for defamation.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The music industry works completely differently in China and everyone knows it. Especially the musicians. They know the only way to make money is through sponsored live performances and product endorsements. No-one expects anyone to pay for recorded music because it's completely impossible to stop piracy.
Yes, yes. Don't feed the trolls. But if the article is a troll in itself, why not?
Interesting - in many ways, we're seeing a return to medieval ideas of productivity and "intellectual property". Payment comes from a wealthy patron, not a wider audience. Works are distributed to anyone who has the means to copy them. Anonymity is not uncommon, especially for more controversial writings. Music earns money in performance. Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity. I think we could learn a lot from people like Chaucer and Dante.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Multiple comments here on /. tells the music industry to adapt to the 'new world'. This is like throwing a lobster in boiling water, and telling it to adapt.
The business model for the music industry has always been:
1. Buy expensive recording and vinyl pressing machines.
(The price on this equipment gives them a de facto monopoly on production)
2. Pay musicians a song for their work (maybe this is where the expression comes from?)
3. Sell disks for as much PROFIT as possible
In the 'new world' there is no monopoly and ipso facto no music industry.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I find myself siding with the music mafia. Not in the "Piracy" sense but in the "boycott" sense.
I'd like nothing better than to boycott Baidu. Their Baidu Spiders arrive in hordes and spend hours crawling my site. They ignore crawl-delays and denies. They're looking for online poker files that were placed there by some illustrious Chinese citizen or other in an attempt to deface my website about two months ago. That lasted about four hours (from the middle of the night, local time, until I woke up next morning and made it go away), but I'm still dealing with the Baidu invasion. They're worse than Genghis Khan. An attempt to contact the email address provided resulted in a bounce stating that my ISP (Comcast) is blocked in China. My next step will probably be simply to block any contact with Baidu at all, and I've been tempted to extend that to the whole of China.
So while I generally deplore the actions of the Music Mafia, my perception is that Baidu has invited the actions by their own behavior, which is by no means above reproach.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I was fooling around trying to be funny with the "link to prince on Google" thing and discovered that if you substitute led zeppelin (or presumably any other RIAA band) you get lots of MP3s from Google.
However, some friends of mine, "The Station", an indie jam band with two CDs out and live shows posted at archive.org for several years (lots of shows posted) and the obligatory MySpace page, AND their own URL, returns "do you mean The Situation?" with a list of RIAA songs with "station" in the name.
The RIAA should sue Google. Or considering that the indies are competing with the RIAA maybe the RIAA paid Google to do this?
Now where did I put that tinfoil, I need to make a hat...
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'm just trying to imagine anybody in China even noticing the RIAA request in the first place. If some Chinese industry group told all businesses in the US to boycott google, do you think it would have a big impact? It's so implausible I have to wonder what the RIAAs motives actually are.