China Implements New Online Music Rules
This is news to me, and I’ve heard nothing except the press reports:
China’s Ministry of Culture has implemented a new set of rules governing the online sale and distribution of foreign songs in the country, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
Online music sites, as well as search engines that provide links to songs, will have to obtain approval from the Chinese government for songs recorded outside the country, according to the newspaper.
The Ministry of Culture said in a statement that the new rules are necessary to weed out “bad content,” a large amount of unapproved imported music and copyright violations, as well as to establish more supervision and regulation over the market, according to the Journal.
Online music providers will have to submit to the Ministry of Culture the lyrics of each foreign song, translated into Chinese, along with evidence proving they have permission from the copyright owners to sell and distribute the songs, the Journal reported. (Yahoo)
I don’t know about this one. Seems to straddle the content control and copyright infringement areas – either one might be motivating the regulators here, although if the MOC is the only agency involved, I’m not so sure they would do anything just for IP reasons. Maybe they’re just concerned about salacious Hip Hop lyrics {sigh}.
Obviously this new scheme looks impossible from the perspective of the sites involved. Yeah, Baidu is going to hire a bunch of people to collect song lyrics and submit them to the MOC for review? And how many of these links are actually to legal content anyway? Very few, I would guess.
Hard to see how something like this will be enforced, and if so, it will be ignored. I will remain a skeptic on this until I see some real action, but if anyone has direct info from the industry, I would love to hear what their reaction is.
I’m amazed no one has picked up on the obvious answer – this is Baidu trying to protect protect their immoral revenue stream from competition from Google.
Baidu, remember, isn’t an online music provider – it’s a search engine, linking to providers. So it doesn’t have to comply with these rules.
Google, however, is an legal online music provider through its partnership with Top100 (owned by Yao Ming). So if they want to keep serving foreign music, they’ll have to spend millions of yuan on translation.
Baidu, meanwhile, can continue to rake in millions of yuan in profits by ‘searching’ the mysterious “yy” network of websites only available through Baidu, which just happens to have all the songs Baidu needs, whenever it needs them (see The Reg’s report at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/13/baidu_investigation/ ).
Disgusting. Why are all the journalists reporting this as bad news for Baidu?
Just going by the article, but won’t Baidu qualify as a search engine that provides links to songs?
Apologies to Baidu. I should have been less arrogant and read the article more carefully.