Music industry giants including Warner Music are jointly sueing Yahoo! China for allegedly playing and providing links to unlicensed music.

Led by industry group International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI), eleven companies including Warner Music, EMI and Sony BMG Music Entertainment are sueing Yahoo! China, a unit of Alibaba, for about 5.5 million yuan (710,000 US dollars) in damages.

Under a deal in 2005, Chinese online auction sites operator Alibaba took over Yahoo Inc. China business and Yahoo bought a 40 percent stake in Alibaba. A spokesman from Alibaba said that Yahoo! China only provides links in its music research results and should not be held responsible for the content of third-party websites. The case was the latest lawsuit Chinese Internet companies face for web music copyright infringement.

In November, Chinese Internet search engine Baidu.com won a similar lawsuit launched by IFPI charging Baidu with helping users to download music illegally. But the IFPI said it is confident its case against Yahoo! China is strong and that it is unwilling to wait until the result of its appeal against the Baidu ruling.

It is estimated the disputes between traditional record companies and Internet firms will continue in China in the next couple of years. Digital music contributes 20 to 30 percent of the total revenue for Warner Music, Universal Music, Sony BMG Music and EMI in China every year, much higher than their world average of 10 percent. And for some Chinese record companies, digital music accounted for around 50 percent of the total revenue.

Digital music is popular in China but legal music downloads are still in their infancy in a country plagued with pirated discs.

Source:佚名