China Imposes New Restrictions on Web Music Searches, Sales

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on September 8, 2009 - 9:22am.

Beijing - The Chinese government has issued new regulations outlawing links on search engines to unauthorized music files, and requiring that all sites offering foreign music to submit songs they offer to censors, The Wall Street Journal reported.

An analyst with Pali Research told TechCrunch that as much as 80% of traffic to Baidu (NASD: BIDU), China's leading search engine, is estimated to come from searches for unauthorized music files.

The Journal noted that the new requirement on submitting songs to censors "could be an enormous bureaucratic task," as digital music services will have to provide written lyrics for each song -- translated into Chinese -- in addition to documents proving they have rights to distribute them.

http://snipurl.com/roc0o (TechCrunch)

http://www.baidu.com