The stats on one of my sites show 8 gigs of downloads this month for a handful of MP3s we host. These are not even music, but excerpts from a Q&A after a documentary screening.

The downloads are coming from Baidu, a Chinese search engine. I plan on blocking the site or at least moving the MP3 files, but I'm wondering why it's happening at all.

Being listed in searches is one thing, but 3000 downloads? This has to be robots -- I don't see why that many actual Chinese speaking people would be interested in listening to a couple independent filmmakers talk about American subway trains. I'm just surprised that the robots actually download the files that much, instead of just pinging them.

Interesting. It might be helpful to note that Baidu has a specialized search engine for MP3 files (or at least, it will until RIAA finishes suing it out of existence). It is possible that the spider has encountered some sort of endless loop - maybe a link to the file is appending random query strings? - and so it keeps mindlessly requesting the same file. I would check your raw log files to see if the file is being requested at the exact correct filename or if there is a variation in the URL. If so, you should track it down and correct it if possible, because other search engines may find the same links.

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The best way to learn anything, is to question everything.

It could have something to do with Playtagger, a bit of javascript code I was using so visitors could play the MP3s without leaving the page.

I've switched over to a flash playlist, moved the file locations, and blocked Baidu's IP.

I'm also looking at the stats for a few other sites I manage. (Some are musicians and podcasters.) No problems on any of their sites so far. Baidu and Soso show up in stats, but not to excessive numbers.

My first question, since China doesn't recognize or enforce U.S. copyright laws, is this really a search engine or is it an automated content pirate?

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Ron http://www.chalicemedia.com Distributed Creative Content Architecture

Hm, maybe more of a search engine indexing pirated content? Baidu's argument seems to be that their linking to media files hosted by others does not break copyright. However, it should be noted that such links have been outlawed in China since about 2007, when the Chinese courts deemed that MP3 searches were illegal.

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The best way to learn anything, is to question everything.

I've seen a few more Chinese sites like this in my hits. Since I don't speak Chinese, it's hard to tell if they're all part of the same company.

In the west, there's sites like Deezer and Blip.fm that do the same thing. As a user, you search for the song you want to hear, then listen through their interface. Meanwhile, the website is hotlinking to random sites that host mp3s, drawing on other peoples' bandwidth.