Baidu Inc to partner with 87 institutions on content

China's search giant Baidu Inc announced Monday that its content sharing platform Baidu Wenku (document archive) has entered into cooperation with 87 institutions to provide licensed contents, a move intended to change the piracy-tainted image of the US-listed company.

With the growth in the number of users, the demand for different kinds of content is also on the rise, particularly for content related to specialized subjects, such as English, law and accounting, Baidu said in a press release e-mailed to the Global Times.

"So far, Baidu Wenku has joined hands with 87 professional content providers, including New Oriental Education & Technology Group, periodicals website cqvip.com and accounting website chinaacc.com, to offer 280,000 documents," Kaiser Kuo, director of international communications at Baidu, told the Global Times yesterday, without revealing details on the mode of payment to these providers.

Meanwhile, individuals can also upload documents to Baidu Wenku to share with others, and the platform now has a total of 300,000 documents offered free of charge, he noted.

Besides cooperation with these institutions to introduce a vast amount of authorized resources, Baidu Wenku is also making greater efforts to update anti-piracy technology to detect and delete pirated content, according to the company.

Baidu split Baidu Reading from Baidu Wenku in December last year to avoid intellectual property infringements, said Sun Peilin, an industrial analyst at Analysys International.

Baidu Reading was Baidu's e-book platform based on cooperation with publishers. And Wenku had to enrich its contents by providing education-related resources, said Sun.

"Those document-sharing websites, including Baidu Wenku and docin.com, have a value proposition as their business models are based on attracting more users and earning revenue from advertising. However, the sector can neither gain big scale nor vanish," Sun said.

Baidu has put more efforts to combat piracy, but it is hard for the company to completely eliminate copyright infringement from its website, according to Sun.