<div><p>A Chinese court has ruled in favour of the nation's top search engine Baidu, saying its links to music downloads do not constitute piracy, state media and a recording industry body said Tuesday.</p><p>Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Hong Kong and Warner Music Hong Kong had demanded that Baidu remove music links they say infringe their copyrights in a lawsuit filed in February 2008.</p><p>The Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court ruled that Baidu's service to provide links to MP3 downloads of songs that infringe copyrights was "legal", the Beijing Times reported, citing unnamed sources with Baidu.</p><p>The court ruled that Baidu offers the searching service for pirated MP3 files, but does not actually pirate the music itself and therefore bore no responsibility to pay any damages, the report said.</p><p>A Hong Kong-based spokesman with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the recording industry's trade body, confirmed they had received the judgement, but declined to comment further.</p><p>Beijing-based Baidu, whose MP3 search feature helped make it the number one search engine among the world's largest Internet population, declined to comment on the outcome.</p><p>Court officials also would not immediately comment when contacted by AFP.</p><p>As Internet usage has soared in Asia in recent years, the music industry's revenue has fallen dramatically, largely due to MP3 downloads from unauthorised sources.</p><p>More than 99 percent of all music files in China are illegal, causing record companies to lose billions of dollars a year, the IFPI said when the case was filed about two years ago.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=67831713&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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