Copyright Issues? In China? Naaa

China is known for creating fake everything, from purses to bootleg movies to even cars. It also has a serious pirating issue with music. According to an article in Forbes, The Music Copy Right Society and R2G (who hold 80% of the musical copyright in China) are taking the search engine Baidu.com to court over such matters. The claim is that Baidu.com is using back-doors and buried websites (that it created) that steam music as well as offer it for download for free to attract people to use their search engine and to profit directly from these illegal websites.

This isn't the first time that there have been court cases involving copyright issues in China. A case, won by the big three (Sony BMG, Warner, Universal) this past December, stated that Yahoo China was found guilty of mass copyright infringements (though Yahoo yet to comply and are being sued because of this). Further, the big three also filed virtually the same suit that MCRS and R2G are filing against Baidu.com in February.

According to David Moser, a copyright lawyer, professor, and author who annually takes his students to China in order to study the culture and witness the piracy and bootlegging first hand the piracy in China is worse than it sounds, and I tend to agree. This issue will only continue to get worse until either the Chinese government steps in to actually do something about the ramped piracy (i.e. enforce the laws and trade agreements made), or someone figures out how to financially "punish" companies that allow/promote piracy because it's clear that even with the ability to legally download music for a small fee, the Chinese want it for free; and, as we all know, if someone wants to get something digital for free, regardless of the country, they're going to get it.

On a side not, click here for some fun fake Chinese rip-offs.