The music industry has just started a new battle against piracy and companies allowing it, as music companies announced on Wednesday they filled lawsuits against China’s popular web sites Baidu.com and Sohu.com, which were accused of aiding illegal online music pirates.

According to the IFPI, or the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, the lawsuits that the music companies filed on Monday ask a Beijing court to order the two popular Chinese web sites to remove from their search engines links to a significant number of web sites carrying unlicensed copies of music.

This is not the first time that music companies file in court lawsuits against Baidu.com, as they previously lost a suit against the popular Chinese web site. However, China later changed its piracy standards and, last year, companies even won a similar case against Yahoo’s Chinese arm.

"We sent notices to Baidu to get them to take down the links and they failed to comply, so we had to sue them," said Leong May Seey, the IFPI's Asia regional director. So, this time Baidu.com is very likely to lose, especially that Google is also involved in the problem.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has already planned to develop an advertising-supported service that would offer legal downloads of music tracks for free. The new service might be launched in the next weeks and it was said to be a joint venture with Top100.cn, a well known Beijing-based web site. Top100.cn already has licensing agreements with many music labels, including Universal Music Group.

Google hasn’t yet confirmed the report. "We're continually exploring opportunities in search, but we don't have anything to announce at this time," Google said in a Wednesday statement.