“Safe Harbor” Doctrine: A Panacea for Chinese Search Engine´s Copyright Infringement Liability or Not

Thanks to the increasingly progressing of search engines, millions of netizens enjoy free music download without pay. However, for the lack of efficient and effective regulations on this issue, copyright infringements caused by search engines have taken central stage in courtrooms. After “Ordinance on the Protection of the Right to Network Dissemination of Information” promulgated in 2006, “safe harbor” doctrine under US. 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was introduced into China and the legal attitude towards copyright protection is going through a great change, which can be clearly seen from the treatment of two significant cases involving Baidu and Yahoo! China. After discussing the copyright infringement of search engines and these two cases, this article explores and analyzes “Safe harbor” doctrine of China and its improvement methods. Finally, this article concludes with some suggestions to the development of search engine industry, hopefully to realize a long time healthy progress and a win-win future.