Key provisions of the Supreme People’s Court’s Draft Provisions on Several Issues on the Application of Laws in the Trial of Disputes Relating to infringement of Communication Rights over Information Networks, released in April, provide: 1) content providers uploading copyright protected works for public access is infringement, 2) providers of purely technological online services are not subject to liability if they are not also content providers, 3) cached pages are protected as fair use if the caching does not unreasonably harm the copyright holder’s interest, and 4) peer-to-peer search, storage and linking service providers can be held liable if they participate in or assist copyright infringement.
According to Xinhua news service, this interpretation follows accusations from more than 40 writers last year that Baidu stole works by offering them as free downloads as part of its free literary database, Wenku. Baidu later removed 2.8 million items from its document sharing services section.