The always fashionable Beijing No 1 Intermediate People's Court has agreed to hear the new lawsuit that has been filed by the record industry against China's number one search engine Baidu.
As much previously reported, the record companies dislike the way search engines in China tend to have a bespoke MP3 search facility which 'deep links' to thousands of illegal digital music files, such a facility making it much easier to access unlicenced music.
The International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry took legal action against Baidu through the Chinese courts back in 2006 in relation to their MP3 search function. Baidu pleaded that old chestnut of a defence - that they didn't actually host the unlicensed music content, they merely linked to it, so they could not be held liable for any copyright infringement - and were successful in doing so, mainly because Chinese copyright law at the time the lawsuit was filed was rather hazy on the whole issue.
Chinese authorities subsequently altered their copyright laws so to clarify the situation regarding deep linking, and as a result a similar IFPI lawsuit against Yahoo! China went in the record companies' favour. Hence their keenness to sue Baidu for a second time. And with the Beijing court now agreeing to hear the new but basically the same case against Baidu, optimists in the record companies reckon this time they will win.
Welcoming the ruling, IFPI Chairman John Kennedy told reporters: "Baidu is China's largest violator of music copyrights, generating huge revenue by deliberately providing access to illegal content. The scale of what it is doing can be summed up by the fact that if the courts were to rule that Baidu should pay maximum statutory damages for all the infringing tracks available through its service, it would have to pay many billions of dollars in compensation".
Given that Baidu is owned by Chinese internet firm Sohu, who are the official internet sponsors of the Beijing Olympics, perhaps record label chiefs could demonstrate their frustration over all the deep linking the modern way - by throwing water over the Olympic torch as it works its way through the US today.