Chinese search engine cleared of copyright infringement charges

Baidu, a Chinese search engine, has been cleared of copyright infringement charges brought by the IFPI, reports Ars Technica. Displaying search results does not constitute copyright infringement, ruled the court.

Baidu may provide deep links to MP3s as part of search results. Amongst those may be copyrighted songs. The Beijing No.1 Intermediate People’s Court has found that this in itself is not a violation of copyright law.

While China does have a somewhat dubious reputation regarding intellectual property rights in general, this verdict reflects other ruling worldwide.

The IFPI, acting on behalf of the music divisions of Universal, Warner and Sony, accused Baidu and a few other firms of supporting piracy in February 2008. They charged the firms with providing links to file sharing networks and more specifically direct links to copyrighted files hosted elsewhere. The IFPI claims to have sought cooperation with Baidu in addressing the problem. This obviously failed, with the IFPI resorting to taking the matter to court. The court ruled that as Plaintiffs failed to identify any of the sites that hosted the infringing content and Bainu did not host the content itself, providing search results is not a violation of copyright law.

29-01-2010