So much for Baidu getting preferential treatment as I mentioned before as Universal, SonyBMG, and Warner are now suing Baidu for violating copyright laws:

Three global record companies have launched legal proceedings against China’s top Internet search engine Baidu.com Inc, accusing it of violating copyright by giving access to music files, an international music trade body said.

Universal Music Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) Ltd and Warner Music Hong Kong Ltd have asked a court to order Baidu to remove all links on its music delivery service to copyright-infringing tracks that they own the rights to, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a statement.

The claims have been filed with a court in Beijing, said IFPI, which is backed by global music industry heavyweights.

Of course, filing a claim is the easy part and will be a long road in trying to prove their case.

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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).

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Talk about cutting it extremely close to the wire:

The Haidian People’s Court in Beijing dismissed the case today. It was dismissed because Google used “Gu Ge” on April 12, 2006, which was seven days before Beijing Gu Ge registered its name.

Then again, used and registered? Seems a stretch really.

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Google China is being sued by Beijing Guge Sci-Tech for supposedly infringing on the firm’s name:

Beijing Guge Sci-Tech alleges that Google has infringed on the firm’s name. According to the court documents, the name “Guge” was officially registered in April 2006 by Beijing Guge Sci-Tech and Google didn’t register the name until November of 2007. Google’s response is that reports on the Internet showed that it intended to use the name “Guge” at the time it was registered by the Chinese company.

Beijing Guge Sci-Tech wants Google to change its Chinese name and to pay legal costs although no sum was mentioned in the court documents. The name “Guge” is not a real word in Chinese but a transliteration.The characters mean “valley song”.

I don’t quite know the exact laws for company names within China, but in the US at least, as long as the two companies are not competing within the same areas, then there’s no issue usually with having the same name (to a point of course). As for registering the domain name, well, first come first serve in the US once again. Still would be funny to see what Google China would rename itself as:

Guge wants Google to change it, and unless the courts side with Google for political/money reasons (and they certainly could), Google may need to rename itself.

A suggestion: How about 大数, the Chinese translation of the word “googol”?

Seriously, would be more fun to figure out what would be better names for 谷歌.

• 骨骼 - bones, skeleton (eh, not funny)
• 古哥 - ancient older brother (probably not the way to promote their brand)
• 辜哥 - guilty / criminal older brother (fits for the situation possibly)
• 顾蛤 - attending to clams (I dunno, seemed an odd combination)
• 钴铬 - cobalt cadmium (yeah Periodic Table!)

Feel free to suggest other ones!

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Plain and simple question to those noting that waterboarding is torture (which it truly is): What legal actions can be taken against them considering what we know so far?

• We know already as I’ve stated from my earlier post that the CIA destroyed interrogation tapes and that a CIA agent admitted to using waterboarding.
• We know that there was extraordinary rendition to other countries as through secret flights (whether through NATO, other countries, or just American flights is still to be seen)
• The US has court-martialed men who used waterboarding during the battle in the Philippines (speaking of which, why can’t the media ever reference these cases? Are they really that lazy and dumb that they cannot go out and do some Google searches or go to a library and study up before they ask our Attorney General?)
• The US has executed former Nazis for the use of “enhanced interrogations” (see previous lazy/dumb media comment
• A military spokesman in front of Congress could not even say whether Iranian military using waterboarding on American troops was torture! (What more do you need of how wrong America has turned these days and how no one f-in care–note how few American religious leaders have spoken out publicly on this)
• Worst is the implicit and tacit acknowledgment now from the President’s spokeswoman that all interrogations done by the US were legal. (She won’t go into whether waterboarding was legal, but follow the simple reasoning: If CIA agent A says he did waterboarding and Prez spokeswoman B says all interrogations were legal, then it goes to follow that waterboarding done by Administration C is not considered torture).

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