A Beijing court has awarded seven Chinese authors, including popular blogger Han Han, damages against search engine Baidu for copyright infringement. The court held that Baidu's Wenku literature searching service illegally published copies of the plaintiffs' works. The seven authors received damages totalling Rmb145,000 ($22,937) from Haidian District People's Court, which was far lower than the amount they requested. The court also denied their requests that the service be shut down and for a public apology. Han, who sued after three of his books appeared on Wenku, had asked for Rmb760,000 and closure of the online library. He was awarded just over Rmb80,000, with the court saying that the evidence of the severity of infringement was insufficient.
More than 40 writers, including Han, signed a letter in March 2011, saying the library provided their works for free download without their permission. Four months later, Han and several others established the Writers' Union to appeal to Baidu.
Baidu has had to defend against copyright infringement complaints in other areas too, including those to do with its Baidu MP3 service.
Australia
TV Now appeal request denied. The Australian High Court has denied Optus’s request for leave to appeal a lower court holding that its TV Now service infringed upon the AFL and NRL’s copyrights. The service allowed mobile users to pick a television programme to record to Optus-controlled servers. The program then streamed to the subscriber’s devices with as little as a two-minute delay. The Full Federal Court had held that Optus made the recording and illegally broadcasted it to its users.
Europe
EU closer to law on orphan works. The European Parliament has passed new legislation designed to make copyright material available to the public if the rights owner cannot be found. The new law, which has been informally agreed by MEPs and member states, aims to protect institutions such as libraries and museums who want to digitise a so-called orphan work. Under the new rules, a work would be treated as orphan if a “diligent” search for the copyright holder, made in good faith, proved unsuccessful. The Council of Ministers is now due to vote on the legislation.
France
Host status confirmed. A French court has confirmed that video-sharing website DailyMotion is a host under the eCommerce directive, thereby giving it an exemption from liability for copyright infringement by its users. But the Paris High Court ordered it to pay plaintiff TF1 €200,000 in damages for failing to remove content quickly enough that was notified to it as being infringing. The website’s owners were also ordered to remove the terms TF1 and LCI from a list of suggested key words on DailyMotion.
US
Google penalises copyright infringers. Websites that receive a high number of valid takedown requests under US DMCA legalisation will rank lower in Google’s search results, under a change in policy announced by the search engine company. There was widespread opposition to the move from activists online, who described it as censorship of otherwise legitimate websites. Those searching for The Pirate Bay, for instance, will not find that the site shows up in Google’s instant or autocomplete searches.
