Yahoo! Loses Music Download Case

[icedragon17]

The Beijing Higher People's Court has made a final judgment that upholds a lower court's ruling that ordered Yahoo! China to pay damages to 11 major record companies for facilitating free music downloads, sources said on Monday.

Yahoo! China appealed to the Beijing Higher People's Court after losing the lawsuit at the Beijing No. 2 Intermediary People's Court in April.

The Beijing No. 2 Intermediary Court had ordered Yahoo! China to pay 210,000 yuan (US$28,510) in damages to the 11 companies, which include EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group.

It also told Yahoo! China to delete the links that allowed Internet users to download 229 songs from other sites.
The record companies began court proceedings in early January, saying that the music had been played or downloaded without their permission, and they demanded 5.5 million yuan in damages.

Yahoo! China insisted that, as a search engine, it only provided links in its music search results and should not be held responsible for the content of third-party Web sites.

source: asianfantics

[URoxMYSox]

This is crazy! Wait...so does Yahoo! China actually provide the downloads, or the LINKS to the download? I just think it's funny that the record companies gang up on one site, and other similar search engine sites like Baidu or Qihoo didn't get sued. Both sites provide download links to 3rd party websites on their own site, so why not them?

[Calltometal]

This is crazy! Wait...so does Yahoo! China actually provide the downloads, or the LINKS to the download?

Yahoo! China lost the case in that they provided links to websites that had the music free for download. Its just a bunch of crap honestly, they are trying to cut off the supply instead of going after a site that holds music all together. This way with getting Yahoo! China which provides many links to a mass of free music, they can get more of a response because it is a bigger quantity than say getting a site that happens to have one or two albums up for free download. In simple words it helps to support the argument if they go after something that makes it possible to access a lot of free music instead of a little.