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Recently China’s largest search engine Baidu has come under fire from music industry accusing it of supporting pirated music.

Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. It attracts at least 5.5 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.

Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu because they believe it is encouraging music piracy. It provides search of MP3 songs and has a dedicated link on its home page.

What I fail to understand is how come this activity comes under piracy? Isn’t this what search engine is supposed to do i.e. index files and provide results to users when they search something. And how come it is different from what Google is doing? I mean when you search some MP3 song on Google it shows results which also includes pirated music so why only point fingers at Baidu? Just because they have a dedicated link to MP3 search doesn’t make them any different from Google. In fact in the same way it can be said that Google is showing pirated and copyrighted images through its dedicated image search feature.

Baidu provides links only to music files stored on third-party servers. No music is stored on computers owned or controlled by Baidu and this is what exactly Google and other search engines do. This clearly shows how hypocrite music industry is.

This accusation is similar in nature as the lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google for showing copyrighted videos on YouTube although these videos are submitted by users and not Google and it doesn’t own them in any way.

The music industry bodies behind the move include the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Music Copyright Society of China and the newly-formed China Audio-Video Copyright Association. The IFPI is currently demanding $9m in damages from Baidu in a copyright lawsuit filed earlier this year.

Baidu uses the same “pay-per-click” model for advertising revenues as its main competitor, Google. It takes almost a quarter of all sales in China’s rapidly expanding online advertising market while Google, search king, ranks fourth with almost 10 per cent of the country’s total online ad revenues.