According to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), popular Chinese search engines Baidu.com and Sohu.com have been sued for aiding illicit online copying, in a move by the music industry to control piracy in the growing Chinese Internet market. The suits, filed Monday by Universal Music Ltd., Sony BMG Music Entertainment Ltd. and Warner Music Hong Kong Ltd., as well as Hong Kong-based Gold Label Entertainment Ltd., ask a Beijing court to order Baidu and Sohu to remove from their search engines links to thousands of sites that carry unlicensed copies of music. Although music companies lost an earlier lawsuit against Baidu, China has since then changed its piracy standards, and companies won a similar case last year against Yahoo's China arm.
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We sent notices to Baidu to get them to take down the links and they failed to comply, so we had to sue them," said the IFPI's Asia regional director, Leong May Seey.
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