The People’s Daily, which is the main newspaper of China’s Communist Party, is claiming that Google censored their website.
Apparently, the paper ran an article about a Chinese group which suggested Google’s book search settlement might violate the rights of Chinese authors. According to publishers, Google retaliated by adding a malware warning to search result listings for the newspaper’s book section for three days, causing the book section to be “maliciously blocked by Google.”
Google has responded, calling claims “absolutely incorrect” and reminding China that malware warnings are generated automatically, being “an automatic function without any human interference”. No human involvement equals no malicious intent, according to Google, but the People’s Daily remains unconvinced.
According to the Inquirer,
In the original copyright dispute, the China Written Works Copyright Society called on Google last week to negotiate compensation for Chinese authors. Google has reached a tentative agreement to compensate American authors and publishers. Google said it is encouraging rightsholders in all countries to register for the settlement.
In June, the Chinese government accused Google of allowing access to pornography. That followed an unexplained outage that temporarily blocked users in China from seeing the search engine or its Gmail service.
Tags: censorship, China, Google, malware