By Jiang Jingjing (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-10 10:47

China's leading search engine, Baidu is facing a new lawsuit just a month after it won a similar court challenge concerning alleged illegal music downloading.

China's music rights organization, the Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC) and a leading Chinese digital music distributor, R2G announced the anti-piracy action against Baidu.

MCSC filed the lawsuit, citing infringement of at least 50 songs, including the well-known Ai Wo Zhong Hua (Love China). It is seeking compensation totaling one million yuan ($140,619) and an end to alleged violations. R2G has also issued a letter threatening legal action against Baidu requesting the de-linking of all its unlicensed content. In due course, R2G will also initiate its own lawsuit, the company says.

"They (Baidu) even provide links to several Olympics-themed songs. The search engine even dares infringing in this area, when protecting the Olympic Games intellectual property is on the top of the nation's agenda," says Wu Jun, R2G's chief executive officer.

Baidu asserts it has placed great importance on intellectual property rights protection and formulated measures to safeguard the rights of intellectual property right holders.

Apart from that, the search engine claims that it has been exploring new types of commercial models to tackle copyright disputes, such as disc promotions and advertisements.

In December, the People's High Court of Beijing ruled that Baidu's music download services did not infringe music content copyright as alleged by five label companies, including Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music.

The ruling, together with first and second round trials that Baidu has won since 2005, has cleared the way for the search engine to provide music search result pages that are linked to unauthorized MP3 download addresses.

"We are confident that we will win the case this time, because the timing is different," says Guo Chunfei, a partner at Beijing Professional Business Law Office, the attorney representing MCSC.

Guo explains the reason why Baidu won the last case was that the ruling was based on the Regulation on the Protection of the Right to Network Dissemination of Information, which only came into force on July 1, 2006. That regulation said that companies should take legal responsibilities if they are aware that their behavior might infringe on other parties' rights. However, the first case against Baidu was filed in 2005, before the new law went into force.

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