Baidu's copyright controversies have reached a new stage. On May 10, Baidu lost a lawsuit to Shanda Literature, a subsidiary of a leading Chinese interactive entertainment media company, Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited.

Baidu, one of the world's largest Internet service providers (ISPs), has recently been under fierce attacks by an alliance of famous Chinese authors for making their works available at Baidu Library without prior consent.

Since the Internet hit China, netizens have been used to downloading movies, games, novels and music freely from the Internet. Now there is pressure for this to end.

Copyright laws in many jurisdictions provide a "safe harbor" exemption to ISPs. In general, if an ISP promptly removes copyrighted content that has been published illegally, it is off the hook. Chinese law also operates under this doctrine and was relied on by Baidu during the lawsuit.

The case was judged in Shanghai. The court found that Baidu explicitly knew of the existence of copyright violation on its website and therefore could not be exempted from infringement.

Let's say that Shanda vs. Baidu is a just cause because knowledge creators such as novelists and musicians deserve an appropriate reward for their creative work. This is a tradition in China as much as in the West.

Many Westerners believe the old Chinese proverb, "To steal a book is an elegant offense," still influences Chinese opinion.

But the Chinese tradition actually highly respects originality, creativity and authorship. Impelled by the boom of commercial publishing in China in the 11th century, this literary tradition soon stimulated the advent of copyright protection.

Today there is an "expectation" issue. Netizens are used to free Internet. It is therefore necessary to make people realize that the emergence of the Internet does not necessarily mean everything is entirely free.

Yet it has been widely argued by leading Western scholars that overprotection of intellectual property, including overpricing, is a more serious issue as compared to copyright infringement.

The fact is that copyright holders and their lobbyists in developed countries have been globally active in seeking stronger copyright protection, at the cost of the public interest of access to knowledge.

A recent example is the US-proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, which covers about 10 countries. It is criticized for being an US wish-list that would create regulations favoring the entertainment industry over the public interest.

Chinese copyright owners, such as Shanda, should be wary of this global background and remain unaffected by international lobbyists purporting unreasonably strong IPR laws. They should bear in mind that knowledge creativity is not standalone but cumulative. The better you can access knowledge, the more you can create.

So, viewing access to knowledge as free is wrong. But this does not mean access to knowledge should be restricted or unreasonably priced.

Technological changes have made it necessary to look for alternative solutions, different from the traditional practice of copyright law.

For instance, the Creative Commons model is a good pattern that can both reward creativity and foster the sharing of knowledge.

We must remain cautious about the driving forces behind Shanda's lawsuit. Let's hope Shanda's motivation is not influenced by the global "virus" of a strong copyright mentality.

After all, there is one question policymakers in China must ask themselves: By promoting copyright protection more strongly, will they fall into the trap of overprotection, leading to suffocating China's continuous creativity and public interest?

(Source:Global Times)