BEIJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Baidu, China's biggest search engine, is set to face a lawsuit for allegedly pirating from the country's leading online literature website, Shanda Literature Limited (SDL), China Daily reported on Saturday.

    Baidu is the latest leading search engine to be entangled in high-profile legal action after Google was sued by Chinese novelist Mian Mian for alleged copyright infringement this week.

    "Baidu's connivance at net piracy leads to over 1 billion yuan of losses to our company every year," claimed SDL CEO Hou Xiaoqiang.

    His company will sue Baidu in January, he said. It will ask Baidu to delete illegal download links and pay indemnity of more than 1 million yuan.

    The three websites owned by SDL boast the largest Internet portal in the world dedicated to original works of literature. SDL said the three websites have already accumulated copyrights to almost 40 billion Chinese characters-worth of original Chinese literature. The highest daily page view volume has exceeded 500 million.

    VIP members of the SDL sites pay 0.02 yuan per thousand words of books. However, SDL claims Baidu is providing numerous links that offer free illegal downloads of works written by their contracted writers.

    Baidu was not available for comment on Friday, said the newspaper.

    Protection of copyright on the Internet is arousing attention in China. Negotiations have continued since last month between Chinese authors and Google. The authors claim Google scanned 18,000 books by 570 Chinese writers without paying the writers.