found this today.
Baidu is a chinese internet searching engine that works like Google. it searches images, musics, news, maps, websites and stuff and has features like blogs, questionaries, and even a baidu-pedia kind of thing.
thearticle was talking about a music industry group in China said it sued Baidu.com earlier this year for the search engine’s alleged violation of copyright involving more than 50 songs. (only 50!?) Music Copyright Society of China released a statement last Friday in which group official Qu Jingming said Baidu had provided “music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its website without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits”.
i used to download free songs from the baidu’s mp3 searching engine all the time back in highschool. just type in any information and the engine will list all the links from other websites that provide music downloads. and if you click the links it goes right into the downloading process. works most of the time. it seems like people never said anything about copyright on these wensites untill a few years ago. and all the singers and artists started telling their loyal fans not to buy pirate copies. they made great effections, too. you can know that from all the parents’ complains about students spending too much money on buying CDs. but still, i believe that in china, millions and millions of people download millions and millions of songs from websites like baidu for free everyday. i do hope that they can solve the pirate music free downloading problem as soon as possible, just because my beloved singers need to make money, too.(not them only of course.) but on the other hand, from a poor student’s perspective, who doesn’t want free songs? anyway, in the baidu case, i don’t think baidu should be completely responsible for the law sue. it’s a searching engine, like we don’t sue google here for providing music links, do we? oh wait a minute, google doesn’t have a music(audio) searching option!! you can find a lot of videos (which are mostly from youtube.com) but not many audio files. hmm they are very different. i’ll look more into it later.
