• Marketing Pilgrim, Thursday, February 7, 2008 12:30 PM

Universal and the Hong Kong-based divisions of Sony BMG and Warner are all suing Baidu and a smaller search engine called Sogou for enabling music piracy, and they're hoping that a court in Beijing will order the engines to remove all links to their music from their SERPs.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), about 99% of all music files distributed in China are pirated--and the search engines' unwillingness to comply with copyright laws when it comes to music downloads is a huge part of the problem.

Google is currently one of the only search engines in China that adheres to copyright laws (which is perhaps one of the reasons why it has yet to overtake Baidu in terms of market share), and the giant is actually working to build partnerships with three major record labels to offer searchers free, legal music downloads.

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