Intellectual Property Law

Bye Bye (Buy?) Baidu

By Posted by Alan Wexelblat

Baidu, the Chinese search powerhouse was on the receiving end this week of a lawsuit by three of the big four record companies. They are asking that Baidu be ordered to stop linking on its music-delivery service to copyrighted tracks. Separate suits were filed against Sohu and Yahoo! China over related infringement charges.

The Chinese market for media is hot and growing fast. Fool.com recently published a piece advising that Baidu was undervalued. This is interesting considering the site's earlier posting advising people to get out of investing in the music business. Baidu has much larger businesses in search/online advertising than it does in music so they may agree to go along with these suits in order to keep their core businesses untouched. Or they may just ignore any decision, as they have in the past.

Full post as published by Copyfight - The Politics of IP on February 07, 2008 (boomark / email).