Legal experts say that search engines are not responsible for pirated content

Sina Science and Technology News in the early morning of February 27, in response to the grand literature claims to be sued Google, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court Intellectual Property Court Judge Zhou Bo accept Sina Technology line said, according to the relevant regulations in China's information network communication field, search engines do not need to be responsible for searching pirated content.

Yesterday afternoon, Shanda Literature held a seminar on copyright protection of Chinese original online literature in Beijing. Hou Xiaoqiang, CEO of Shanda Literature, said he planned to file a lawsuit against Google and demanded that search engines have a sense of responsibility, remind and Mark links suspected of piracy. He also pointed out that Shanda Literature had negotiated with Google many parties before the Spring Festival, but it had not received a positive response from Google.

According to Judge Zhou Bo, according to the "safe harbor" principle in "regulations on protection of information network communication right" promulgated by China in 2006, search engines do not need to be responsible for searching webpages suspected of piracy and infringement. The search engine is only responsible for providing evidence of infringement to the search engine and requesting the search engine to delete the pirated links it crawls.

Professor Gao Fuping from the school of intellectual property at East China University of Political Science and Law told Sina that the "safe haven" principle mentioned above is already a consensus in the industry, and search engines do not need to be responsible for this. From another perspective, search engines can also help anti-piracy. Professor Gao pointed out that the elimination of network piracy should not rely solely on the law. It is best to strengthen communication and self-discipline between industries.

Judge Zhou Bo has the same feelings about this. He said that due to the difficulty in collecting evidence and other reasons, the current use of judicial means to solve the piracy problem of network literature is too costly, and it is difficult to achieve a radical effect. He pointed out that, as predicted by some experts and scholars, he hoped that the future progress of Internet technology could bring some changes to copyright protection and the industry could be more self-disciplined.

Hou Xiaoqiang added in an interview with Sina Technology yesterday evening that Shanda Literature had previously known the existence of the "safe harbor" rule and sued Google for neither speculation nor claims, rather, it hopes to increase Google's attention to piracy and facilitate the in-depth cooperation between the two parties.

Hou Xiaoqiang hopes that the "in-depth cooperation" is that the search engine also provides a "safe haven" for the copyright holder and uses the "exclusion division" to add a suspected pirated logo to the links of non-genuine online literature. This practice has a precedent in the field of anti-malware. Hou Xiaoqiang believes that the field of network literature can also be used for reference.