Baidu has been a target ever since it emerged as China's number one search engine. Crawling roughly everything, it was inevitable to be involved some way or the other in lawsuits caused by users uploading and linking to pirated software and entertainment content. So far, it was not involved this year in any scandal regarding programs and applications, but judging by the wave of lawsuits filed against it for the other type of content, it won't be long until that happens.

After being sued earlier this month by Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Hong Kong and Warner Music Hong Kong, Baidu has been asked to defend its case in front of a court following a lawsuit filed by the Music Copyright Society of China. It must be deja-vu for the world's fourth largest search engine, as just last December it had to face similar charges under the same circumstances.

The MCSC, under the National Copyright Administration, has asked Baidu to stop infringing copyrights for 50 songs, according to AFP, quoting Market News. "Baidu is not the only search engine involved in infringing music copyrights, but currently it is the largest," said Qu Jingming, director of the society, according to the report. "We can only 'capture the ringleader first in order to catch all the followers." Luckily for the Chinese search engine market leader, the penalty is rather mild, a mere one million yuan, or 140,000 dollars. Then again, compared to the monster fine that Microsoft was given on Wednesday, any sum below $100 million is looking mild.

Baidu must be going through a dry spell of some sort, starting in December, with the lawsuit mentioned above, followed by the death of its CFO around Christmas time, another lawsuit with the big names in the music industry and with being censored after Valentine's by the authorities, for helping spread images related to a notorious local sex scandal.