Dave Horvath
19 Nov 2006 13:36
Several music labels including the likes of EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music collectively lost a lawsuit in which they tried to take down a Chinese MP3 search engine.
Baidu.com faced a lawsuit from the aforementioned companies for providing links to copyright protected music. The overturn in the ruling, however stated that the links provided were downloaded on third-party webservers and not from Baidu themselves. The companies involved with suing Baidu had demanded a formal public apology, termination of service and payment of over $216,000 in "damages".
Baidu had argued that its service provides the same type of services as other search engines in which links are provided for content of third party webservers. In their statment, Baidu representatives said, "If the music companies had won, the whole search engine sector would have ground to a halt".
Score one for the little guy as record labels try every possible angle to reap more money out of its digital battle.
Source:
BBC