I always have enjoyed pointing out to people how to get free Chinese music from Baidu, then showing them how you can get it from Yahoo! China, but not Yahoo! US. It was really only a matter of time that the big record labels caught on and did something about this:

 Yahoo! China lost their appeal to the Beijing Higher People’s Court who upheld a lower court’s ruling in April that the company had violated copyright laws. Yahoo! China has insisted all along that it only provides links to websites for music search results and they should not be held liable for content provided by those third-party web sites.

And of course, Baidu gets preferential treatment:

Meanwhile, Baidu.com successively won the first and second round of their trial. Seven label companies filed the lawsuit against Baidu.com for infringement of their music copyrights. Baidu.com, like Yahoo! China had been insisting that the responsibility lied in the third party websites that provided the illegal music downloads. The local court in Beijing ruled that the music download service offered by Baidu.com was in fact legal.

Early this year, Baidu and EMI signed a strategic partnership deal for online music streaming and download services. Baidu is now authorized to stream EMI Chinese music on its music search channel. EMI Music, the world’s largest independent music company, will share the revenues generated by the advertising.

Goes to show how far nationalism and market strength can go towards helping keep various services for search engines (in case you didn’t know, a lot of Chinese citizens use Baidu for music).