Chinese search engine Baidu is facing charges of illicit competition after online video website LeTV filed a lawsuit against the Internet giant for allegedly blocking all advertisements while grabbing and playing the online stream of LeTV, according to a Beijing court on Monday, Feb. 22.
The Haidian District People's Court said that LeTV failed to earn from advertising revenue as the pre-roll, webpage and cut-in ads are blocked without authorization when users watch the LeTV online stream via the Baidu Video app, China Daily reported.
The report said that because the ads were blocked, users only saw videos without reference to LeTV and mistook Baidu as the source of the video.
LeTV requested Baidu to stop the illicit competition and asked for compensation of 1 million yuan ($153,400).
The report said that the court has accepted the case, but did not disclose the hearing date.
LeTV, or Leshi Internet Information Technology Corp., was established in 2004 and listed in Shenzhen. It has a total market value of around 100 billion yuan.
According to reports, it was not the first time that Baidu got itself involved in a legal issue. In 2013, a group of Chinese companies that include video hosting services Youku Tudou, Sohu, and Tencent's qq.com filed a $48.9 million lawsuit against Baidu.
In the same year, Baidu, together with Tencent, filed an unfair competition lawsuit against Qihoo, for stealing its website content and infringing on its Internet service protocols. The Beijing High People's Court ruled in favor of Baidu and ordered Qihoo to pay a fine of 450,000 yuan ($72,000), as reported by zdnet.com.
Baidu won one of its biggest cases in 2014 when a U.S. court dismissed a lawsuit against the Chinese tech giant in a case about censorship and free speech.
The lawsuit was filed by a group of eight New York-based content producers who said that Baidu's search engine algorithms block material in the U.S. based on the Chinese government's heavy censorship laws, which violates the U.S. Constitution.
But U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan disagreed and said "the First Amendment protects Baidu's right to advocate for systems of government other than democracy (in China or elsewhere) just as surely as it protects plaintiffs' rights to advocate for democracy."