Chinese search engine not guilty of piracy

A CUNNING plan by the music industry to have China's number one search engine done for piracy has run aground.

A Beijing appeals court has found Baidu.com not guilty of property rights infringement.

The case, bought by EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music, was based on the fact that Baidu.com helped pirates find torrents.

The music business wanted $US 222,666 and an apology, which is about what it would normally charge one P2P pirate in the US. Saying you are sorry is not that important in the US.

But a Beijing intermediate court had ruled in November that Baidu's links to the music did not constitute infringement.

It argued that since the music was downloaded to the Web servers of third parties, Baidu was not responsible.

But to confuse things a little, both rulings contradict a decision by another Beijing court to ordered Baidu to pay a distributor of EMI US$8,400 US dollars in compensation for providing such web links.

There were concerns that the moves in China were a dress rehearsal for a similar move by the movie and music biz against Google.

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