Who will bear the responsibility of pirated online music in China? Businessweek says that “Chinese search engines make it easy to steal Net Tunes.”
Eric Zhu is just the sort of customer that Western music labels want to reach in China. The 28-year-old Beijing resident is a sales director for a local company and enjoys listening to Western pop, from the Backstreet Boys to the Spice Girls, on his MP3 player. Zhu doesn’t pay for his tunes, though. Like millions of other young Chinese, he downloads them for free using Baidu.com (BIDU ), the country’s biggest search engine. Baidu makes it so easy”just hit the MP3 tab on the home page, type in the name of the song, and click. What’s more, Zhu doesn’t believe he and his friends are doing anything wrong. “I think it’s a problem with the law, not with us users,” he says….[Full Text]
