Yahoo is being sued by the world's largest music companies for perpetuating copyright infringement on its China-based portal. "Yahoo China has been blatantly infringing our members' rights. We have
started the process and as far as we're concerned we're on the track to litigation," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the music industry trade group the International Federation of
the Phonographic Industry. Kennedy said the group would listen to negotiation, but could not promise that this would solve the dispute. Yahoo China is a joint partnership between Yahoo, which owns 40
percent of the entity, and Alibaba.com. The IFPI contends that Yahoo China provides links on its search engine to sites that offer unlicensed music downloads. Kennedy has said before that online
piracy "threatens to strangle the fledgling legitimate digital music market before it has hardly evolved." The IFPI says that roughly 85 percent of all music consumed in China is pirated. Worldwide,
the music industry has relied on suing file-sharing companies and their users to curb illegal downloading.
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