Chinese netizens enjoying free online reading might soon be paying for literary works as two pillars of China's Internet world appear to make up in a row over piracy.

On-line publisher Shanda Literature Corporation (SDL) is hoping that a pledge by search giant Baidu to resolve complaints that it "connives" in copyright violations could see an end to unauthorized copies.

Baidu has said it will introduce charges for on-line literature.

"We will make efforts to solve the copyright issue," Zhu Guang, a senior official of Baidu's market department, said Thursday at a ceremony to celebrate the first anniversary of Baidu's online library.

Zhu's remarks were welcomed by Shanda, which owns more than 80 percent of the country's on-line literary publications, as well as the seven leading original Chinese literature websites.

Its Qidian site, for example, charges VIP members 0.02 yuan per thousand words of popular e-books.

"Each of Qidian's 10 most popular original Internet novels is pirated 8 million times on average, meaning that if the cost of reading a novel is 1 yuan, the economic loss is 8 million yuan (1.2 million U.S. dollars)," Shanda CEO Hou Xiaoqiang told Xinhua.

More than 1.1 million authors had signed contracts to provide Shanda with original works, but pirated versions were commonly found among Baidu search results, he said.

"Baidu's connivance at net piracy leads to over a billion yuan of losses to our company every year," Hou said.

The losses to Shanda's contracted authors, who were paid according to reading fees, ran into millions of yuan.

A hotbed of theft

However, pirate websites could operate at only a fraction of the cost that Shanda invested in its services.

A website management specialist surnamed Jiao explained to Xinhua how website operators hired netizens to register as VIP users of official sites and then asked them to copy the content of popular novels.

If the official websites used technologies to prevent their works being copied, the pirates would just type out the content, said Jiao.

Pirate websites profited by charging lower reading fees than the official sites or just from advertising links.

Shanda said Baidu's "lenient" attitude to piracy had resulted in Baidu's online library becoming a hotbed of on-line copyright theft.

Baidu was also accused of profiting from advertising on pirate websites and by deliberately filtering out Shanda results.

Shanda filed a lawsuit against Baidu in March. The Luwan district court in Shanghai is assessing evidence from both sides, but no hearing date has been set.

China Written Works Copyright Society, China's sole literary copyright collective management organization, has backed Shanda, urging publishers and authors to join the lawsuit against Baidu.