Yahoo! China being sued for playing and linking to pirated digital media

Yahoo! China being sued for playing and linking to pirated digital media

Music industry giants including Warner Music are suing the Yahoo’s Chinese division Yahoo! China. They are claiming that the web search company played and provided links to unlicensed music.

International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is being led by eleven music companies including Warner Music, EMI and Sony BMG Music Entertainment and they are asking for about 5.5 million Yuan in damages.

A spokesman from Alibaba which controls the service responded by saying that the service only provides links in its music research results. They further said that the service cannot be held liable for content present on other websites whom they are linking to.

Interestingly, Baidu.com was also sometime back charged with a similar lawsuit by the IFPI which had claimed that the search engine service was helping web users download pirated media from the web. They won the lawsuit.

Liu Bin, an analyst with consulting firm BDA China spoke about these new developments: “Digital music contributes 20 to 30 percent of the total revenue for Warner Music, Universal Music, Sony BMG Music and EMI in China every year, much higher than their world average of 10 percent. And for some Chinese record companies, digital music accounted for around 50 percent of the total revenue.”