Double whammy for Baidu in leaks of data and copyrighted works
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, April 7, 2011
BAIDU, China's largest search engine, is again in hot water, this time humbled by a double whammy that has roots in its information hegemony.
In late March it became the target of an online campaign waged by scores of acclaimed writers and publishers, who took the company to task for providing free unauthorized download of literary works from its Wenku file storage system. Banding together as an "Anti-Baidu Alliance," they requested the copyrighted material be deleted outright and demanded an apology from Baidu.
After several days of procrastinating on a public response, Baidu bowed to the alliance, and its CEO Robin Li promised to remove all the items in the literature category from Wenku within three days. The "apology" was tepid.
The rectification seems to be complete, since search queries for recently published books on Wenku return nothing. What remains freely available are mostly ancient classics and non-literary works. But if the victorious writers were looking for signs of soul-searching on Baidu's part, there was none to be found. The company's "apology" vastly downplayed its wrongdoing, only saying it had "hurt the feelings of a few authors."
Even if some rogue barons also deny wrongdoing when caught in an illegal act, the audacity exhibited by Baidu eclipses them all. Obviously the search engine has seen and survived so many PR crises that it hardly bothers changing its ways.
Though offended by Baidu's insolence, many writers, publishers and artists have no choice but to accept the fact that it's legally impossible to make the company pay for its arrogance, if not for copyright infringement.
Shady practices
By holding high the rhetorical banner of Internet sharing for free, Baidu has been openly violating copyright laws and lining its pockets for some time now. It derives profits from sponsored links on Wenku and in a few cases even charges readers for access to stolen works.
When the free flow of information is used as a convenient excuse to legitimize shady practices, we ought to be wary of that sanctified phrase. In an age when most information can be obtained at a mouse click, we tend to think that nothing can be withheld from us without human manipulation.
But Baidu and its likes are seriously challenging this belief. They decide what we read online by directing us to the websites of their most generous patrons.
That Baidu ranks search results according to the sums paid is not newsworthy, but it recently took its scandalous ranking algorithm a step further by its complicity in the theft of private information, probably for sale.
The case came to light when some local media reported that the personal information of 3,600 households in 30 upscale residential complexes had been divulged on Baidu. The information included the names, addresses and phone numbers of homeowners.
If not for this revelation, many of the homeowners would still be puzzled as to why they could receive up to 10 calls a day, from real estate brokers, sales people and scammers who already knew their contact information.
Mystery
Yet it remains a mystery as to how the information could fall into the wrong hands in the first place. There are many possible culprits in the leakage - banks and telecommunications companies could be among them - and the difficulty in pinpointing them makes it hard to take legal action.
That, however, doesn't exculpate Baidu, which pleaded innocence but then hastily removed all the leaked information - just as hastily as it did the copyrighted literary works. Nevertheless, before this move, if one typed "Golf VIP" or "Shanghai bosses" into Baidu's search box, long lists of businessmen topped the results. A few remain available at a price.
It appears that Baidu is better at charging for higher search rankings than at policing itself.
With its slack regulation of online content, Baidu has become a parody of WikiLeaks, though they are hugely different in purposes.
The "BaiduLeaks" are not meant to create a transparent world as envisioned by Julian Assange. Quite the opposite. They are the natural result of a safe haven the firm sometimes offers to malevolent forces.
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