Baidu Turns Up Anti-Piarcy Tune 百度展开反盗版行动
Internet search leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) made plenty of noise last year when it announced a series of landmark licensing agreements with major Hollywood music labels, trumpeting the move as part of its drive to wean itself from the trading of pirated material on its platforms. But while it tooted its horn over the deals with Universal, Warner Music (NYSE: WMG) and Sony Music (previous post), it also quietly continued to operate its controversial music swapping platform that was the source of much of the earlier criticism. Now in an interesting move, Baidu is being much more low-keye in what looks like its attempt to quietly de-emphasize and perhaps eventually phase out the controversial music swapping service.
Chinese media are reporting that Baidu has quietly begun redirecting search queries for individual songs away from the controversial song-swapping site and sending them instead to its newer site for legally licensed music downloads, called Baidu Music. (English article) The reports say Baidu is making the move as part of a broader drive to encourage more people to listen to music on its site rather than download it.
If users can listen to music for free, perhaps this strategy will work since Chinese consumers have shown little interest in paying to download legal copies of their favorite songs. Still, Baidu and others who have signed recent Hollywood licensing agreements, such as video sites Youku Tudou (NYSE: YOKU), will face a big task ahead if they really want to convince Chinese consumers to pay to watch legal copies of their favorite TV shows and listen to their favorite music online.
Regardless of the challenges, I have to commend Baidu on its latest move, as it will clearly lose many of the users who previously used the company’s music-swapping site to download their favorite latest songs for free. Clearly Baidu feels it can make this kind of a trade-off as it tries to become more like its western counterparts that take a much more aggressive stand against allowing illegal activity on their sties.
This kind of action is just the latest in a series of steps the big Chinese web sites have taken over the last year as they finally get serious about trying to stamp out piracy. Baidu was rewarded for its efforts last year when the US removed the company from a periodic list it publishes of “notorious” sites that facilitate piracy. E-commerce leader Alibaba is also currently lobbying hard to have its name removed from the list, where it has been singled out for facilitating the trading of counterfeit goods. (previous post) It has taken a number of steps to clean up both the quality of goods and service offered by merchants on its TMall e-commerce platform, and could well be removed from the list when the next edition is published.
If Baidu and the others are really serious about their drive, which they appear to be, their next step will be to provide better protection not only for the big foreign companies but also smaller Chinese firms and artists that also suffer equally when their material is pirated. Many Chinese authors complain that illegal copies of their material are still passively available on Baidu and other search engines. Still, at the end of the day I have to commend Baidu for this latest action and expect we’ll see more such efforts in the years ahead as it and its peers aim to clean up their act and wean themselves from a dependence on piracy.
Bottom line: Baidu’s de-emphasis of its controversial music represents its latest step to wean itself from piracy, with more efforts likely to come as it tries to act more like their western peers.
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