Digital Information WA

I haven't visit a lot of digital service websites in US. In China, there are a lot of such things, however, most of them I think are illegal - or half legal, I think.

baidu.com is the most widely used search engine in China. It is even more widely used than google, because it parses the Chinese words better. Baidu is also a large legal company. However, in the baidu search tabs, there is a tab "MP3" which links to mp3.baidu.com this is a MP3 search engine and searches specific songs very fast and promising. And all of the mp3 are able to free download directly (Most of them are Chinese songs although)，and baidu provides the file size, link speed, author etc. However, I don't think this is a legal way to provide songs - even the latest albums can be searched in this way. And the source itself, may be illegal also. But baidu says like "These are auto-searched results, baidu has nothing to do with this blablabla..". Baidu is one of the most significant Computer-related companies in China, but this direct media search is still violating some of the rules. How do they make money? Ads like Google, of course.

Lets see another example that fits better the assignment. Xunlei is an important downloading software widely used in China, and its free. By the way, this is already ironically enough - how can a downloading software be so popular? Because there are so many thing that people can download - free but illegal. There are millions of software users in China, but no more than 2% software are legal. And what about films and music? Who knows.

Xunlei also provides an movie download engine, however, it takes copies and film names and even comments for the film. But instead on "online watching" or "downloading" it provides a link saying "Online search". And this link leads to a search link, which 99% is available. Okay, so this looks like another search engine, that doesn't take any responsibility of its contents. However, as I tracked down the IP of the downloading link, it is an ftp server that is owned by... Xunlei itself. How funny it is that they are sharing there own files, but they say, no.. I am not the nice one. It is pretty much a way to get rid of trouble, and it is no way against the Chinese law. But this is another illegal example. How do they make money? There are hundreds of advertisements on a single page.

Sopcast is another free software, written by some Chinese guys. It is a p2p online tv/movie software which we can watch live sports or else. Anyone is able to release something on the platform and everyone can see it. However, at least they are providing something that is legal. Which makes some difference. The online-movie part is able for people to watch some movies from their server - quite old ones - for free and they are in the public pot. And most of the live TV they provide are free in their countries. Although those are not the ones that most of the users are intrested in. The development is still an individual team that only works on this software, and they make money through ads and donation.


Since most of softwares or music or movies are "actually" illegal, of course they take no responsibility for them. And the user is free to do anything they want. However, selling illegal CD or DVD copies is illegal to the Chinese law. Which finally protects something.

Since illegal source is so easy to get and everyone does this, it is really impossible to find something "legal" according to the CS-law in China. The illegal way is too widely used that most users don't even think it is wrong. And in this case, if some website is charging some money for online-movies or else, it is like impossible to get any members - even if they are doing the best interface or something. It just doesn't make any sense to pay for just copying something. I'm sorry that I could find any source of legal way to download something. But it simply doesn't exist in China.