Sohu earned $40.2 million in net income during the quarter ending June 30th, which puts it up 604 percent over the same period last year and 86 percent over last quarter.  The growth of China’s online population deserves at least part of the credit.  Interest in the Olympics has also had a role.

 Charles Zhang

Otherwise, Dr. Charles Zhang, Sohu’s chairman and CEO, spoke about "our strong media influence, premier content offerings and increased popularity of our products such as Sohu Blogs and Sogou Pinyin, and the growth of our online games business."  And that last factor deserves a special look.

It seems Sohu is interested in putting Changyou, the games unit, onto the U.S. stock market with an IPO.  Numbers, dates, and dollar amounts aren’t yet being shared, but Sohu would remain a majority shareholder.  The parent company could then concentrate on its core businesses without giving up loads of control or revenue.

For this reason and several others, Sohu expects its third quarter to turn out well.  The company’s stock, meanwhile, is experiencing some turbulence that’s roughly in line with the rest of the tech sector.

Big music labels will try to slay the Chinese dragon of song piracy by forcing major Chinese search sites Baidu and Sohu to cut their links to pirated songs.

Good luck with that. When people want music, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out in its report, they will find ways to get it even if the two search sites Americanize themselves to satisfy the labels.

The Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court faces the task of deciding the case. If they opt to penalize Baidu $9 million in damages, and Sohu $7.5 million, they could be sending a message that linking to content they do not host assigns liability to the search engines.

Both Baidu and Sohu deny any responsibility for what other sites host. As search engines, they only provide a list of links.

The lawsuit poses greater implications beyond the song-listening habits in China. Armed with a decision in favor of the plaintiffs, other litigation-minded types around the world might decide the time is right to bring back the "deep-linking" lawsuits of yesteryear.

You have to go all the way back to 1997, as the Web started to takeoff into mainstream usage, to find the Ticketmaster versus Microsoft Sidewalk lawsuit over linking. Ticketmaster did not want Sidewalk linking directly to individual event pages, but to the home page of Ticketmaster instead.

As Salon recounted, Ticketmaster had a deal in place with CitySearch at the time to permit it to "deep link" to ticket pages. Eventually everything reached a settlement.

Everything but the concept of deep linking.

Without hyperlinks, there is no Web. The news industry used to complain about deep links to their stories, around the time Ticketmaster made its rumblings at Sidewalk.

But if there is a law against deep linking, we have yet to see it. Despite that, American sites routinely yield to lawyers who complain about links to content the sites themselves do not host.

The issue needs a decision, for more than just the idea of deep linking. It comes back to fair use, a nebulous concept that resists attempts to define, yet seems to become more restrictive year after year. JD Lasica wrote Darknet to address the continued erosion of fair use by deep-pocketed music, movie, and publishing interests.

Though it has been claimed fair use needs to be loosely defined to work best, as to not push any particular content into a model that doesn’t really suit it, fair use and its advocates need to grow up and figure out a way to function in the 21st Century.

Otherwise, a Chinese court may make that decision for everyone. It may not be the best decision for a Web that grew on its strength of links. If the bullying music industry makes its mark in China with this case, make no mistake, others can and will try to use it to their advantage.

A world of commentary controlled entirely by corporate interests, even more so than today, can’t be what’s best. It’s not all about links. It’s about control.

“The overall strategy of Sohu is to be not only a news portal but also a big community – like MySpace,” said Charles Zhang, Sohu’s chairman, in an interview with Sophie Taylor.

And on that note, I’ll move on to Sohu’s list of accomplishments.  Now, when quoting companies’ statements, I often make fun of them – the claims can get kinda wild.  Yet Sohu’s description is largely accurate.  “Sohu has built one of the most comprehensive matrices of Chinese language web properties and proprietary search engines,” it begins.

The description then names “www.sohu.com, the mass portal and leading online media destination,” “an interactive search engine,” “the #1 online alumni club,” “a top real estate and home furnishing website,” “the #1 games information portal,” “a wireless value-added services provider,” and “a leading online mapping service provider.”

So, yeah, in terms of diversity, a video-sharing service will fit in just fine with the rest of Sohu’s offerings.  It will probably also measure up in terms of quality; Sohu is, after all, the company from which Google copied some data.

Reuters reports that “Sohu – ‘search fox’ in Chinese – like many others is trying to gain traction against heavyweights Google Inc. and Baidu.com Inc., which together command three-quarters of the search engine market in China.”  This new video-sharing site will probably help Sohu do precisely that.

According to Reuters, the American search engine company is now working on damage control.  "We are willing to face this issue of ours," Google said in a statement.  "While we apologize for the inconvenience this may have incurred to users and Sohu, we have also adopted immediate actions."

"Immediate" may not have been fast enough, however – in fact, the search engine giant’s actions didn’t seem immediate at all to some onlookers.  "Google refused to confirm or deny that they had used Sohu’s database," reported iTWire’s Alex Zaharov-Reutt.  And Sohu is still waiting on an official apology – that "database resources" stuff just doesn’t count.

Google wants everyone to know that it has addressed the issue, however, regardless of any subjective references to time.  "[W]e have completed the second comprehensive upgrade (version 17 of beta 1.0) of the Gu Ge pinyin input system," a company statement declared.  "The new dictionary is now based on tens of thousands of entries Google’s enormous search database has accumulated over the years."

Just the same, the search engine giant is lucky that this incident took place in China – the scrutiny would, to be honest, probably be a lot more intense had this all occurred within American borders.