Music Labels Lose Copyright Suit Against Baidu
Baidu, China's largest search engine, just cleared a hurdle on copyright infringement with the music industry. The Chinese courts ruled that directing users to illegally downloadable material from third party sites did not constitute a violation, overturning an earlier favorable ruling for EMI.
From the BBC:
"If the music companies had won, the whole search engine sector would have ground to a halt," Xinhua news agency quoted a Baidu spokesman as saying.
The report said the music companies would appeal against the ruling.



Comments
It seems there's a line being drawn between crawling, indexing and displaying search results (which can take the form of media) and physical storage of such media e.g. YouTube. It's in Google's, Yahoo's, MSN's, Asks and other vertical engines best interest to defend the ability to crawl, index and display information in whatever digital form it takes. I believe a world wide precedent has been set with the Baidu ruling, and a good one at that!
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