One dirty if open secret to the turbocharged growth of Chinese Internet services is that they have been convenient portals to piracy. Youku and Tudou became famous for their troves of pirated movies and television shows on their way to leading the Chinese online video sector. Taobao became the go-to Web marketplace in China for counterfeit goods while becoming the go-to Web marketplace in China, period (see my story in this issue of Forbes on Taobao’s creator, Jack Ma). And Baidu’s reputation for full service in enabling users’ quests for pirated content — such as larding search results with mp3 links for one-stop downloading — helped the Chinese search engine to its dominant perch.
Baidu’s billionaire co-founder and CEO Robin Li, the richest man in China with $9.4 billion, is viewed by some as the Chinese Internet’s pirate king. In recent days, Li has faced a swell of criticism that he built his fortune in part by stealing from the poor, or more precisely, by allowing others to steal from the poor — in this case, Chinese authors whose works have been pirated en masse via user uploads to Baidu’s Wenku (Library) service. It is like a Napster for books, only if Napster were owned by Google (Google Books operates under a different, if also controversial, model, the most important difference being it does not allow users to download the entire text of copyright-protected books).
Read more at Forbes
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