Alibaba, the parent company of Yahoo China since buying it from Yahoo for $750 million last year, now faces another expense – music copyright infringement.
The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) spent part of 2005 chasing down China’s top search engine, Baidu.com, for infringing on music copyrights. Now the IFPI has Yahoo China in its sights, a Bloomberg report noted this morning.
Aiding the action will be a new Chinese law that took effect on July 1st. This law focuses on punishing those who illegally share files. However, a provision in the law makes websites jointly liable for linking to those files “if it knows or should know that the work, performance or sound or video recording linked to was infringing,” the report noted.
Such a provision places an immense burden on search engines, which would have to manually review every link to a song or video. To avoid that expense, search engines in China could conceivably prevent any media file from being indexed, regardless of its legality for sharing.
The IFPI is not saying how much its music label membership wants from the search engines as compensation for alleged infringement. John Kennedy, IFPI chairman, told Bloomberg a similar case in the US could be worth tens of millions of dollars or more.
Infringement of copyrighted works has been an ongoing issue between the United States and China for some time. If China does not improve its record on cracking down on such piracy, the US has threatened to bring up the matter with the World Trade Organization.
In 2005, the US Supreme Court had the opportunity to clarify the whole issue of file sharing. In MGM v Grokster, the court instead chose to issue an opinion that a website that promotes itself as a way of evading copyright was illegal, and neatly dodged the central question about whether or not people can trade files legally.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
