Baidu search engine set to face copyright lawsuit

Baidu, China's biggest search engine, is set to face a lawsuit for allegedly pirating from the country's leading online literature website, Shanda Literature Limited (SDL).

Baidu is the latest leading search engine to be entangled in high-profile legal action after Google was sued by Chinese novelist Mian Mian for alleged copyright infringement this week.

"Baidu's connivance at net piracy leads to over one billion yuan of losses to our company every year," claimed SDL CEO Hou Xiaoqiang.

His company will sue Baidu in January, he said. It will ask Baidu to delete illegal download links and pay indemnity of more than one million yuan.

The three websites owned by SDL boast the largest Internet portal in the world dedicated to original works of literature. SDI said the three websites have already accumulated copyrights to almost 40 billion Chinese characters-worth of original Chinese literature. The highest daily page view volume has exceeded 500 million.

VIP members of the SDL sites pay 0.02 yuan per thousand words of books. However, SDL claims Baidu is providing numerous links that offer free illegal downloads of works written by their contracted writers.

"Each one of the top 10 hot books in SDL has five million search results in Baidu. But it is ridiculous and unacceptable that the overwhelming majority of these are illegal download links," said SDL.

Baidu was not available for comment on Friday.