A group of China's internet companies have joined forces to sue China's biggest search engine Baidu over copy right violations. They initiated an anti-pirate-video campaign in Beijing on Wednesday, in a bid to win back their dwindling share of China's video streaming market.
300 million yuan, or about 50 million U.S dollars, is the amount China's top video streaming websites are suing Baidu for. They claim Baidu has stolen and shared copy-righted videos that other companies have paid for.
Youku-tudou, Sohu and Tencent have accused the search engine of snapping up links from websites of legitimate video providers, and sharing them on Baidu's own video streaming website, for free. They believe Baidu attracts large quantities of video views, without paying a cent for copy-right, or cloud storage.
Zhang Chaoyang, CEO of SOHU, said the online video streaming industry spends as much as 200 million U.S dollars every year to buy copy rights of popular TV dramas and movies. And Baidu's action has caused unfathomable damages.
"Baidu video and Baidu Player are providing pirated streaming. We estimate that half of flow has gone to Baidu. Therefore nobody wants to buy advertisements with us. This has caused immeasurable losses in China's video streaming industry," Zhang said.
In response, Baidu's Wu Jian, supervisor of video technology, said in a phone interview that the company respects copy rights.
"We will follow the legal procedure. We can't make any comment as we are only looking after the technology part. But Baidu highly values copy right protection issues in the online video industry," Wu said.
The anti-piracy coalition has announced that they will completely block search access from Baidu Video, starting Wednesday. There will also be measures against video stealing technologies.
