Yahoo loses legal battle against pirates in China
An industry group says it has won a new round in a court battle with Yahoo Inc.’s China arm, which is accused of helping online music pirates. A Beijing appeals court on Thursday upheld a ruling against Yahoo China over its search engine’s links to outside Web sites that carried illegally copied music, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries said. Court officials would not confirm the report. A spokesman for Alibaba.com, the local partner that manages Yahoo’s China arm, said he had not seen the ruling and could not comment on it. But the spokesman, Porter Erisman, said Yahoo China hoped to reach an agreement with music companies to create a licensed download service. China is a leading source of pirated copies of music, movies and other goods. Operators of pirate Web sites offer music, games and other services to attract users and make money from advertising or online commerce.
Industry groups have won a series of lawsuits against companies accused of profiting from piracy but say violations are growing despite increased Chinese government enforcement. In the latest case, the IFPI — representing companies including Warner Music Group Corp., Sony BMG and Universal Vivendi — accused Yahoo China of violating copyrights because of links between its search engine and Web sites with 229 illegally copied songs. The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ruled in April that Yahoo China facilitated the infringement of copyrights and awarded 210,000 yuan ($27,000) in damages. This is a really stupid legal case, I can’t stand IFPI lately, because they just do a terrible mess. Suing a search engine for displaying results? Jesus Christ, what are they going to sue next. Also, notice the fine, I guess it would be 100x higher in the USA…
Dang!, i feel bad for yahoo
The music industry still hasn’t a clue. All this wasted energy on pointless lawsuits that amount to a gnat lying down on the railroad tracks trying to stop the express.
The old model is over, gone, history and if they can’t think up a better new model than dragging aged ex- big sellers out for one more tour (eg Led Zepplin, Spice Girls) the music publishing industry is going to be as dead tomorrow as cd retailers are today.
The chinese government is twisted. Sue a search engine for displaying results? WTF? Maybe if yahoo had a direct link to the pirate sites. Well, i say yahoo just blocks chinese ips..google and msn need to get in on this too. Hell, we should just stop ban china from using the internet until they apologize.
blobsters, they cant block chinese ips - this market is so huge and perspective they would lose millions. big money involved here. that’s also a reason why these companies adjust to chinese government and filter their search results…
i’ve never heard the spice girls put on a par with led zepellin before.
The IFPI, theyre an evil force, worse and more powerful than most governments and should be destroyed as soon as can be arranged
Martin… I think he was being sarcastic
the piracy situation in china, lol. even their fake foodstuff gets on the news every now and then! go figure~
Sounds like handing over dissidents hasn’t resulted in the leverage Yahoo banked on. Oh well, can’t win em all.
As an aside, I’m going to cancel my yahoo email. I’d rather set up my own domain and create my “spam guard” emails from there, than use Yahoo any more. Using them doesn’t feel ok any more.
well yahoo do not deserve this. i say they block chineese i.p. because this problem will occur again. and i agree with the individual who wrote the report on this, it is stupid. don’t these guys better things to do, in addition to all of this the piper has come to toot his horn, due to all the artist that was screwed over lke dr. dre, and counless ohters.
Well since chinas laws on copyright are practically non-existant i can’t see ifpi winning anything real. But i guess they fit there fine since they probably had to bribe government officials to even get to court… Lucky they underestimated yahoo since they obviously bribed more. Pretending theres a legal court in china is hilarious.
There are no real cd’s or dvds in china since you pay 5 yuan for a decent quality dvd, “china-legally”.
All these copyright groups, MPAA, RIAA, IFPI, etc., are like bulls in a china shop. They don’t care what they destory as long as they get what they want. If you were to set a button in front of them and explain that pushing it would disable every technology in the world capable of being used to “infringe” copyrights regardless of whether or not such technologies had valid, legitimate uses, they’d slam that button before you could even finish the above sentence. They’d never even stop to think that such a list would include cell phones, email and even the internet itself.