China and the Chinese products have always been famous for its notorious infringements, which are actually just a bare copy of the Western goods, software and other intellectual property. Worse has been in the case of the search engines, which has seen China parting away from the remainder in the tech world. Websites like Baidu and Taobao were blacklisted by the U.S, Government, which landed them in the world’s “notorious markets” list. Baidu earned the said achievement in February of this year. The emphasis was on the copyright infringement clause.
Here’s what the US Trade Representative said in February:
Baidu exemplifies the problem of online services engaged in “deep linking,” which provide links to online locations containing the allegedly infringing materials. The [notorious markets] list also includes numerous examples of websites involved in BitTorrent tracking and indexing, which facilitate the high speed transfer of infringing materials between users, as well as Internet markets involved in specific activities such as piracy of sports telecasts, Smartphone software and physical products . . .
Copyright infringements have been an issue for quite some time, and especially with the efforts worked on the notorious Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), made things look worse for an infringer. In the marketing land, the implications of the same did not spare Google too. Many experts shared their thoughts too on the same. One of the experts, Chris Sherman has even written an extensive discussion of the bill and its potential impact over on Marketing Land.
SOPA has given birth to a newly instilled faith that there is a possibility that an infringer would work on those efforts, with which it can pay back and credit the original creator, to some extent at least.
However, talking about Baidu, the company’s research seems to be excelling in terms of removing the tag, without adopting a number of efforts for the same. Keeping in mind various infringed portions, it worked out equations and later on Reuters noted that in July, Baidu settled with the big music labels and agreed to offer royalty payments and to “distribute licensed songs through its mp3 search service.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said yesterday in a statement, “The notorious markets highlighted in this review negatively impact legitimate businesses and industries of all sizes that rely on intellectual property to protect their goods and services.” He added, “We hope that this review will continue to yield the kind of concrete action from highlighted markets that led to the removal of several markets from the list this year.”
The credit for this move, was even because Baidu is on the NASDAQ and it was eagerly trying to get a clean chit from the US Trade Representatives.
For the Chinese, there are many other companies, still tagged in the ‘notorious’ list. They are Alibaba-owned Taobao (as mentioned), Pirate Bay, IsoHunt, torrentz.com, Allofmp3 clones and a range of other sites mostly based in Eastern Europe or China.
With Baidu getting a clean chit, it would be interesting to note as to how does it affect the U.S. search market share.