A district court in China has reportedly ordered search engine Baidu to pay compensation to a literary website after finding it guilty of copyright infringement.
The Shanghai Daily reported that the Luwan District People’s Court asked Baidu to pay Qidian.com 550,000 yuan ($84,722) for copyright infringement for five novels.
Qidian had sued Baidu in March 2010 accusing it of providing links to pirated versions of the novels for which it owned the Internet copyrights.
Baidu has filed an appeal against the order.
Baidu, which currently has a market share of about 70% of China’s search market, was established in 2000 by co-founders, Robin Li and Eric Xu. It is registered in the Cayman Islands.
Over the past few months, the company has been involved several disputes related to copyright and piracy.
It had to remove 2.8 million works from the Literary Works section of the site following complaints by authors that it was distributing their work without permission.
Earlier this year, the US Trade Representative’s office cited Baidu in a list of 33 websites that it deemed "notorious markets" linked to sales of pirated or fake goods.
Baidu had said that it will introduce anti-piracy technology for its document and books product this month.
