I was just chatting with a friend in Canada and she suggested a check out the new Foo Fighters single – The Pretender. Being the suavy Chinese Internet surfer I am, I jumped over to Baidu’s handy mp3 search and immediately brought it up.
Impressed with my slick mp3 finding prowess, my friend asked how I found it so fast. I copy and pasted the search results link for her and nothing but confusion insued.
After finally figuring out she wasn’t getting any search results on her end, I decided to do a little reverse proxy trickary – correctly figuring if I can use a US-based proxy to get around the Great Firewall, perhaps I can also use it to synthesize being in North America.
Sure enough:
The screenshot on the left (click to big it) is the page as it appears to me here in China, the page on the right is how it appeared to my friend in Canada.
A quick search (Google this time) revealed that Shanghaiist reported this phenom back in December:
If you think only Chinese people use Baidu, you’re dead wrong. Recently, a friend of ours in the US complained that he was unable to find any more music through Baidu’s MP3 search service. Not a surprise really, since that treasure trove of pirated music that is now getting sued for big bucks in a Beijing court by some of the biggest names in music including Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and their local subsidiaries, Cinepoly, Go East and Gold Label for the infringement of the copyright of “hundreds of songs”. All eyes are on this court case now as this is one that may force Baidu to shut down its MP3 search service.
The article went on to say that service was also blocked in Germany. The States, Canada and Germany – let us know if your country is blocked in the comments. By “blocked”, I don’t mean you can’t gain access to the search engine, but rather the search will simply yield no results.
Actually, blocked isn’t the right word for it at all. A block implies that the country where the person is attempting to access the content is stopping them from doing so. Such is the case when trying to access any of a bazillion Web sites here in the Mainland. However, I imagine that this blockage comes direct from Baidu as a (rather simpleton) method of trying to avoid legal action from litigious Western record labels.
So, and I swear I never thought I’d ask this, but does anyone know of any good Chinese proxies for my friends back home?
I just tried the same search here in Japan (Tokyo) and got quite a few results. No problems from Japan!
Ryan,
This isn’t a free route but there are some paid VPN services that use encrypted tunnels to pass traffic. The only question is whether or not the Swiss are also being blocked.
http://www.swissvpn.net/
You can also look to leverage Tor but you run the risk of allowing stuff to pass through your network that will get you put in jail (both in China and the US).
Ah, jail time… tempting, but I suppose not really worth a few free MP3s 🙂
I think this has a lot to do with Baidu’s desire for American investors — it’s a CYA move.
Baidu is blocking mp3 search in Korea, too.
It was not doing it a couple of months ago when I first tried the service.
What a pity!