China’s highest court ruled on Thursday that Yahoo! China had illegally facilitated free music downloads and thus helped Chinese pirates spread infringed music tracks. This means that the eleven major record labels that had sued Yahoo! China in January scored an important victory against the popular Internet company, which now has to pay $28,600 (210,000 yuan) in damages.

The decision that the Beijing Higher People’s Court took on Thursday sustained a lower court’s previous ruling against Yahoo, which now really has to delete the problematic links that allowed users to download no less than 229 songs from other web sites.

Yahoo China continually denied any liability to the accusations brought by EMI, Universal Music Group, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and others, as the company claimed that it can not be held responsible for third-party web sites. As a search engine, Yahoo said it merely found links to those outside web sites that in fact carried music that had been illegally copied.

But it seems that the Chinese courts did not believe Yahoo’s claims and considered that the company intentionally helped online music pirates. However, the record companies, which were represented by industry group International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), were awarded with only $28,600 in damages, despite the fact they sought no less than $750,270.

Piracy represents a major problem in China and this is probably why both the Beijing No. 2 Intermediary People's Court and the Beijing Higher People's Court immediately sided with the record companies.