Baidu ordered to halt downloading service

Chinese Internet search engine Baidu.com Inc. Monday said a Beijing court ordered the company to stop providing music downloading services as part of a copyright infringement suit brought by Shanghai Busheng Music Culture Media Co.

The company, which was fined RMB 68,000 ($8,407), said it would appeal.

"We believe that the district court order was based on a misunderstanding of the search engine technology and therefore is without merit," the company's lawyer Decheng Li of Beijing law firm Zhonglun W&D said in a statement.

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Music labels have argued that Baidu violates copyright law by providing the links to the download services.

Baidu said in the statement that it provides search services, but not downloading services.

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"Since Shanghai Busheng merely listed the songs to which it has a copyright but didn't provide the (Web) addresses of the infringing websites, removal of links to such songs would entail 'filtering' or 'blocking' of any multimedia files containing the same file names," the attorney said.

Such an action prevents users from viewing authorized media files and interferes with the rights of file owners to have their copyrighted files included in a search, Baidu said.

President Hu Jintao promised President Bush last Tuesday at the United Nations summit that China was willing to work on ways to prevent infringement of intellectual property rights.