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Digital Top Stories
Baidu announces deal with Chinese collecting society
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 4 April 2011
China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, announced last week that it had struck up a deal with the Music Copyright Society Of China which means it will start paying a publishing royalty on any MP3s downloaded or streamed via the search platform.
As much previously reported, Baidu has been the target of a lot of criticism and a little bit of litigation from the music industry over the years for its MP3 search function, which lets users specifically search the net for MP3 files by artist or song name. The vast majority of the MP3s linked to come from unlicensed servers, some of which – according to past reports in The Register – could only be accessed via the search engine, suggesting the Chinese company was deliberately rather than incidentally providing access to copyright infringing music. Either way, the result was the same, easy access to millions of unlicensed free downloads.
Under the new agreement with MCSC, China’s only collecting society, which has affiliations with various rights bodies elsewhere around the world, including the UK’s PRS For Music, Baidu will pass a share of advertising revenue on for every track accessed via the search platform. Exactly what the royalty will be has not yet been revealed, but even if it is tiny – which it almost certainly will be – at least it’s a step up from nothing.
Baidu spokesman Kaiser Kuo added: “We will also provide the Society playback and download data, so that they will be able to have some idea of what’s actually being downloaded”.
Meanwhile Liu Ping, Vice-General Secretary of MCSC told reporters: “The changes Baidu is making could create a really wide-reaching music platform through the internet that will lead to profits for those in the music industry. This has never happened before in China”.
Of course, this deal only compensates songwriters and publishers, and not the owners of the sound recordings. However, Kuo indicated that the search firm hopes some sort of deal can now be reached with the record companies also. Quite what deal they’ll be offering, and whether it will placate the major labels, remains to be seen. The big content owners may have to write off past infringements, and any damages they feel they may be due, in return for the opportunity to see some kind of royalty-paying system going live in China, a market always notorious for rampant piracy even before the internet.
