MUSIC TO YOUR EARS

Two downloading stories for the IPKat’s loyal readers:

• Reuters reports that Chinese search engine Baidu.com has been sued by a number of major music labels for copyright infringement. The record companies claim that Baidu is providing links to sites which offer illegal downloads, though Baidu is not offering the downloads itself. While the IPKat doesn’t approve of infringing downloads, expecting search engines to police the sites that they search and offer links to could have a major chilling effect on the ease with which the internet can be navigated, if search engines are more cautious about what they search as a result.



• * P2P.net reports on proposed new Finnish copyright legislation, which takes a novel approach to breaking copy protection on CDs and DVDs in order to transfer the music on those media on to MP3 players for personal use. Such decryption wouldn’t be subject to criminal sanctions, but record companies would be entitled to compensation if such activities came to light. The same approach would be taken to illegal downloads. The IPKat thinks such a scheme is innovative, but he wonders how much the compulsory-licence type scheme will benefit copyright owners, considering that they’ll have to catch the downloaders and decrypters first. However, a large part of him feels that personal users should be entitled to transfer their music collections to MP3 format as of right. In vogue music recording systems seem to change at least once a decade. The cost to users of buying their music collections in each new medium every time is crippling.