| THE MUSIC industry seems to have started legal action against search engines for promoting software piracy. The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, which includes EMI, has sued the Chinese version of Yahoo, claiming that it provides links to piracy sites. The IFPI says that it was currently negotiating with Yahoo, but if these talks fail then the full weight of the music industry will fall on the search outfit. In recent court cases against P2P sites, the operators have said that all they did was provide links to torrents, they did not supply the pirated material themselves. In suing the P2P outfits, they said, the music industry might as well sue Google or Yahoo. This recent action has indicated that the entertainment industry is considering such a cunning plan. It is focusing its attention on China, where the government has just made changes in the law and fines distributors of illegally copied music, movies and other material over the Internet as much as 100,000 yuan ($12,500). The music industry has already had some success against the Chinese search outfit Baidu.com. This is because the Chinese law says that a Web site is jointly liable with the host of the pirated files for infringement "if it knows or should know that the work, performance or sound or video recording linked to was infringing". Such laws do not exist in the West, otherwise, it seems, Google would have been sued a long time ago. |
