Forbes.com reports that Baidu, the leading search engine in China, is being sued by the Music Copyright Society of China and R2G for providing access to, and making profits from, pirated content. My colleague Wolf Richter had already blogged about the efforts from IFPI and the majors to boost copyright enforcement measures in the country.
What I found quite curious this time was the following statement from MCSC and R2G:
Baidu hides behind the guise of a ‘neutral search engine’ and employs sophisticated secret music Web sites and deep links which without the requisite technology expertise makes it almost impossible for copyright holders to detect and protect their rights by exposing Baidu’s dubious activities.
Well, is the music industry being neutral in its unremitting effort to make the Chinese society assimilate values that are so foreign to their culture? Would Baidu be a “neutral search engine” if mechanisms to enforce copyright protection were embedded in it?
It is particularly interesting to notice that the name Baidu itself means “hundreds of times”, and represents a “persistent search for the ideal“.
Instead of bemoaning Baidu’s lack of neutrality, the real point that the music industry should be mulling over is… whose ideal(s)?
2 Responses to “W[h]ither Values in Baidu?”
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Marcelo Thompson is a Research / Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Master of Laws in IT & IP Law at The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law. He is currently wrapping up his Doctorate of Philosophy at the OII.
Actually I interpreted the statement differently. Baidu has always claimed that they are simply a search engine and as such are immune from prosecution. However, if they are indeed hosting the music files themselves, that changes the game altogether and opens them to charges of active piracy, not even secondary piracy.
Surely it wouldn’t be right to excuse such an infringement in the name of culture?
Thanks for the comment, Max. But let me note that the post does not tackle on whether Baidu is liable for primary or contributory infringement or not.
It merely discusses:
i) the plausibility of a claim that search engines should be neutral. In this sense, it argues that actually such claim for neutrality only disguises the defense of other interests — be them legal or not — with which a principle of neutrality is usually cloaked; and
ii) whether the enforcement of current intellectual property laws is compatible with the prevailing values of the Chinese society. In this sense, it links to a very interesting article from Prof William P Alford, Director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, whose reading I highly recommend.
Best,
MT