Is Baidu A Pirate?

By DT Staff Published October 25, 2009

Earlier in 2008 the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) filed a copyright lawsuit against Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, to the tune of $9 million.

Now they’ve gone a step further, and along with the Music Copyright Society of China and the newly-minted China Audio-Video Copyright Association they’re trying to hit Baidu in the wallet by encouraging advertisers to boycott the site.

Recommended Videos

The music industry reps claimed Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China – quite a claim when they admit that about 80% of the total music revenue goes to pirates.

Baidu doe have a music search engine, with a link from its home page. However, the music files are all on third-party servers, none of which are controlled or owned by Baidu.

Baidu is the biggest search engine in a country where computer growth is expanding exponentially, claiming 25% of the ad revenue market. To offer a comparison, the best that Western powerhouse Google can manage there is fourth place and 10%.

Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…

Topics

QuickCharge: This Week in EV

Computing

Microsoft has begun rolling out Copilot Code for building apps with natural language

The workplace-focused vibe coding tool can pull context from emails, documents, meetings, and chats.

Microsoft introduced Code last month as one of the three core parts of its revamped Copilot app. The app was pitched as an easy-to-use coding agent that lets users describe what they want to build in natural language, like an app, a tracker, a dashboard, an automation, or a workflow, and Copilot would build it for them.

Essentially, it's a workplace-focused vibe-coding app that turns existing work into a functional app, and Microsoft has begun rolling it out through the Frontier program.

Computing

AI agents are acting like rogues and causing a huge headache for US banks

US banks block AI agents over fears they could make unauthorised financial moves

Banking

US banks are facing a new kind of digital headache: artificial intelligence agents attempting to access customer accounts and perform actions that may go beyond what users intended. As AI tools become more capable of navigating websites and carrying out tasks independently, financial institutions are scrambling to prevent them from crossing security boundaries.

According to a report published by Axios on October 22, major US banks have detected third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts without authorisation. Some agents reportedly appeared to attempt actions independently of user instructions. The banks involved have not publicly detailed every incident, and there is no evidence that the reported activity resulted in widespread theft of customer funds.

Computing

Canva enters the AI image generation race with Craft, and it’s thinking beyond pretty pictures

The new model plans layouts before generating images, with precise editing and support for 30 aspect ratios.

Canva Craft Featured Image

AI can generate all kinds of pretty pictures, but getting it to spell a headline correctly or keep a poster's layout intact can be another story. Canva wants to fix that with Canva Craft, its first in-house image generation model. Rather than focusing primarily on photographs, Craft is designed around the posters, presentations, social media graphics, and other visual content people actually create. The goal is simple: spend less time fixing AI's mistakes and more time making something useful.

Canva Craft plans before it generates