Chinese Pirates Still Riding the Waves


Access Asia says:
A couple of months back, we moaned about how our content was being ripped off by those pirates over at Baidu. Despite Baidu ripping of just about every author in China, it seems they did at least take down our content and apologised. Since then they've been roundly criticised by everyone from the US government to the Chinese Writer's Union - now the Beijing government, which for years let them amass fortunes by letting people access stolen material, is investigating them too. But at least, after being forced to think about it a bit, Baidu are a wee bit penitent. A shame that they had to be shamed into taking action, but still, small mercies.

Baidu continue to rip off, a bit less than before admittedly, but at least now they get punched every so often - just last week Shanghai's Luwan District People's Court found the pirates at Baidu guilty of copyright infringement and ordered Baidu to pay RMB500,000 in compensation to Shanda Interactive's online literature subsidiary, Cloudary. Let's be frank, when a Chinese court finds you guilty of copyright infringement then you've really, really infringed some copyright!!

Of course, it's not just Baidu, it's just that historically that company and its minions have been the most obdurate and arrogant offenders.

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