Japanese Publishers want Baidu to remove Pirated Manga

In a bid to fight against pirated content such as Japanese manga, anime and novels on Baidu, four major Japanese publishers associations had requested Baidu Japan to remove these content. In response, Baidu Japan had so far removed over 3,000 illegal copies of the Japanese manga series “One Piece” during mid February.

“Authors and publishers have made removal requests to Baidu each time the existence of these ‘digital bootlegs’ is discovered, but there is no end to the illegal uploading of data and the cat-and-mouse-game continues […] Baidu bears grave responsibility for this problem,” said the statement.

However, the problem is likely to persist as the large size of Baidu Library made it hard to monitor all copyright infringements. Even daily monitoring of the database wouldn’t be enough to fish out all the piracy content.

Free stuff always works. The first time when I learned about Baidu in Singapore was when my friends told me that the Chinese search engine offers free Chinese pop songs. That somehow made Baidu (relatively) popular among Chinese Singaporeans. The same thing could have happened in Japan. Free manga is the reason why Japanese are logging on to Baidu.

As the online space grows larger, piracy is something that publishers have to fight against. It’s just too simple for both the pirated content creators and consumers.

For this case, I believe the root of the problem comes from the users. To stop this once and for all, users who uploaded piracy content have to be to be banned from Baidu services. A couple of bans would be enough to send tremors to the rest of the community, signaling the seriousness of this matter. But it doesn’t seem that Baidu is ready to take this extreme action. After all, users who upload content are usually Baidu enthusiasts. Tough choice, Baidu Japan.