Baidu Inc target of anti-piracy campaign
Print Edition
China’s largest search engine, Baidu Inc, is being sued for providing illegal links to pirated broadcasts of online videos, according to a joint campaign against video piracy launched yesterday.
Members of the campaign include the country’s leading online video providers — Youku Tudou Inc, Tencent Holdings and Souhu.com Inc — the China Film Copyright Association and the Motion Picture Association of America.
The group is suing Baidu for 300 million yuan (US$48 million) for losses they claim are caused by the company’s practices.
In a joint statement, Sohu.com, Tencent, Youku Tudou and LeTV said they had set up technical barriers to block Baidu’s access to their online video content.
“Baidu provided links to a number of online video sites on its video search page as well as other smartphone and tablet computer applications, which is a serious infringement of copyright,” Youku Tudou Inc chief technology officer Yao Jian said in the statement.
Youku Tudou Inc has the largest market share in the domestic online video market with a 28.3 percent share in terms of sales income, according to research firm Analysys International.
However, the New York-listed company posted a net loss of 105 million yuan in the second quarter this year, as content costs continued to rise.
Baidu’s IQiyi and PPStream had a combined 16.9 percent market share, followed by Sohu’s 10 percent and Tencent’s 8.5 percent.
“The alliance is clearly targeted at the rising pressure from Baidu’s iQiyi and this could push up the license fees for high-quality TV and film content next year,” said Zhou Juan, general manager of 56.com, a smaller online video site.
Baidu said yesterday it had blocked up to 5.8 million links to illegal online video content in the past six months and said it was taking the copyright issue “very seriously.”
“Unlicensed content has been a big issue for the online video industry as a whole and we’ll step up our efforts to fight against these problems,” it said. Internet consultancy iResearch Inc said the online video market grew 37.3 percent from a year ago in the third quarter to be worth 3.25 billion yuan.
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