Music will be licensed to Baidu and either streamed or downloaded from the company’s servers.

Baidu will compensate the rights-holders on what is being described as a “per-play and per-download basis” .

Users will be able to sign up for membership free of charge through the advertising-supported ting! website, ting.baidu.com.

“Baidu has always striven to provide the best possible experience to our users,” said Jennifer Li, Chief Financial Officer of Baidu. “I’m confident that Baidu, the Chinese music fans, recording artists, and the record companies alike will all benefit from this win-win partnership.”

For years Baidu offered an MP3 search feature which allowed users to find music tracks online, a feature that led to users accessing unlicensed music, a situation which angered the labels.

The landmark agreement, endorsed by the Beijing High People’s Court, ended outstanding litigation between Universal, Warner, Sony and Baidu.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Baidu has become increasingly popular with the Chinese population for its MP3 indexing abilities. While its “MP3 Search” provides algorithm-generated links to millions of undoubtedly illicit copyright tracks hosted by others (so-called “deep-linking”), Baidu has always insisted that the provision of such links alone is entirely legal. Needless to say, IFPI, the global music group, disagrees strongly with this assertion.

“The music industry in China wants partnership with the technology companies – but you cannot build partnership on the basis of systemic theft of copyrighted music and that is why we have been forced to take further actions,” said John Kennedy, Chairman and Chief Executive of IFPI, in a February 2008 statement.

Bolstered by an earlier ruling against Yahoo China, by further actions Kennedy unsurprisingly meant “legal actions.” In early 2008, IFPI (Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music) sued Baidu.com for $9m. Today the result of that case has been made public.

Beijing No.1 Intermediate People’s Court has cleared Baidu on accusations of copyright infringement, with a court statement showing that simply providing search results does not breach Chinese copyright law. According to lawyer Sun Yan, the case against the search giant fell because IFPI failed to identify the actual sites hosting the illegal music downloads.

IFPI has challenged Baidu – and lost – in the Beijing No.1 Intermediate Court before. In September 2005, IFPI filed claims regarding nearly 200 music tracks it claimed were made available via Baidu. In 2006, the Court ruled Baidu was not infringing copyright. IFPI appealed to the Beijing Higher People’s Court which upheld the earlier ruling.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It soon became apparent that VeryCD was not the only P2P website to be hijacked. A host of BitTorrent sites, including Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were also affected. People in the Beijing area who attempted to access the sites were promptly redirecting to Baidu, China’s Google.

The domain hijacks continued for more than two days straight, but were lifted yesterday. According to some sources, there was never an attempt to censor the BitTorrent sites, claiming that a DNS error cause the problems. This doesn’t seem very plausible though, as the diversions almost exclusively involved P2P related sites, which are hosted right across the globe. Also, DNS issues can’t explain why all the P2P sites were suddenly redirected to another website.

Mininova co-founder Niek, whose domain was also redirected to Baidu told TorrentFreak: “We had the questionable honor of joining Wikipedia and YouTube on the list of websites that (at some point) were censored in China. Fortunately the people in charge made the right decision, and realized that blocking a search engine like Mininova wasn’t such a good idea.”

“I’m happy to see that the block is removed now, though it would be nice to talk to the people who made this decision so we can understand their motives,” Niek added. The true reason behind the hijack attempt will probably never come to light. Most importantly, the ‘problems’ are resolved now, and all BitTorrent sites are accessible again.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.