Music Industry Tells Advertisers to Boycott "Pirate" Baidu

An anonymous reader points to a story at PC Authority, which begins: "Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu, China's largest search engine, because they believe it is encouraging music piracy. Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China, according to the representatives, who describe the company as 'incorrigible.' The Chinese firm's music search engine is accessed through what is described as a prominent link on the company's home page."

Don't all search engines do this?

[hostyle]

http://www.google.com/search?q=prince+mp3+%22index+of%22 [google.com]

Re:Don't all search engines do this?

[ironfrost]

But Google doesn't set up a page with links to searches like that for the top 500 tracks [baidu.com] (as well as other selections by genre) and link to that page from their homepage.

Re:How Do I Submit My Tracks?

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't "submit" your music to Baidu, as laxly enforced as Chinese copy right law, openly hosting pirated music on servers of one of the most well-known internet companies with extensive business and financial connections to the US is still not something most sane people would do. I'd tell you, Baidu people aren't crazy. What Baidu provides is a mp3 search engine, you type in what you want, click search, Baidu will return a list of mp3 file hosted on myriad of other often very small Chinese sites (these sites are too numerous, too Chinese and too obscure to attract attention from major record labels), you click on the mp3 link (or wmp, or real, or some other format), you can either listen to it in the browser or you can save the file to your machine.

BTW, one of the reason Baidu kicks Google's ass in Chinese market is the mp3 search engine, for music lovers who don't want to pay for their hobbies, Baidu is simply irreplaceable. Yahoo China also provides similar mp3 search functions in their search engine, although the size of their mp3 index is far smaller than Baidu's.

Another BTW, Baidu will check your ip when you search music, if you were from outside China, too bad, you search will return nothing.

Re:How Do I Submit My Tracks?

[SensiMillia]

I'm living in Beijing and, as far as I can find out, there is not much censorship on music (most Chinese can not understand English lyrics anyway).

Unfortunatly the selection of music sold is quite limited. The recent hit parade and old time classics are readily available in the CD shops or on the street. (all are copies, legal CD's are very hard to come by)

But then again, you are able to find just about everything on the internet. Ting (Mandarin chinese for 'to hear') is one of the better MP3 sites, indexing thousands of MP3's in a wide range of styles which can be freely listened to online.
(http://www.ting-mp3.com)

Re:Don't all search engines do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then replace prince with your artists of choice and you set, I thought it was rather obvious.

Re:cool.

[mark_hill97]

Except the radio stations don't pay for it, they sometimes even get paid to put certain tracks on because the music execs quite rightly figured out nobody wants to pay for music that they have never heard of before.
Or at least that's how it is right now, lately the RIAA has been pushing to make them pay up. (source) [latimes.com]

Re:How Do I Submit My Tracks?

[DNS-and-BIND]

OK, thanks for qualifying that with "I live in Beijing". Living in Beijing, I can understand why you're so ignorant (it's like living in New York City in America, it's at sea regarding the rest of the country). There's plenty of censorship in music, it's just because you never see it (because it's censored, duh). One reason that music isn't so popular in China is due to its bland uniformity...the Party likes inoffensive drivel like love songs, not Rage Against the Machine or Dead Kennedys. Even "punk" bands like Brain Failure toe the line. Trust me, music is censored just like everything else.

Re:cool.

[sticks_us]

Opportunist: in some areas (South America? Africa?) copying is so widespread that artists can't really make a living off their music

It's that way in most of the world, really. I'd bet 99% of all musicians don't make a living off their music; they may look cool when they're playing in their bar band on Saturday night, but they're right back in the cubicle (or fishing boat, depending on your profession) with the rest of us on Monday.

We see and read about the rich musicians at the very top all the time, but they're a miniscule fraction of the entire music playing populace. It's obvious that the organizations responsible for all the copyright bruhaha are interested in protecting those few moneymakers at the top of the pile.

psychodelicacy: Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity

This is a good point. The definition of plagiarism is subjective and like all things settled by litigation, usually favors the people with the most expensive lawyers (i.e. the top media/communications companies). It's been that way in pop music forever (a few good examples can be found in the book, Confessions of a Record Producer [amazon.com]) -- one only has to look at the R&B (Black) music scene in the 1950s-70s to see how many ideas were illegally swiped and resold by people like Pat Boone.

Re:How Do I Submit My Tracks?

[unicorn_2003_1]

Yes, I'm a Chinese. Baidu crawls Chinese websites to index music files stored on various servers. You just need to submit your homepage, and baiduspider will index your music files along with html/etc. The link to submit is: http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html [baidu.com] The submission page itself is in Chinese. But it's still easy to use. You input your address and the Captcha code, hit the button and it's done. Good luck with your CC music.

Re:Why didn't the FTC convict Sony?

[bigstrat2003]

Most of your post is accurate (even if it won't be popular), but I couldn't help noticing one thing:

MediaSentry and other RIAA hackers have done no harm.

Oh really? [slashdot.org]

I prefer this russian/english site for mp3s

[GlobalColding]

www.tagoo.ru great site for finding obscure mp3s from obscure sources like Doctor Demento and Billy and the Boingers, stuff that you cant buy even if you wanted to.

Re:Thanks!

[MightyYar]

You give the music industry WAAAAY too much credit.

They are much simpler beasts than this. They didn't mind FM taping too much (after they fought the cassette tape tooth and nail, mind you) because the artists still get a cut of the FM broadcast (and the more people listening, the more they make), and the analog medium of tape is too crappy to make a bunch of copies for all of your friends. In short, they still controlled distribution.

They essentially killed (won) the battle over digital recording the first time 'round (DAT, MiniDisc, etc) by effectively neutering the devices - but the PC snuck up on them because they couldn't retroactively ban it. Then the MP3 players came out from startup companies that simply didn't take the step of negotiating with the music industry, and they won their court cases. Now they've lost control of distribution and they are having an absolute shit fit...