Baidu, China's largest Internet search engine, has agreed to compensate songwriters for music downloads after being criticized for years of embedding links on its site to unlicensed music files.

Under an agreement reached on Thursday, Baidu will start paying songwriters via the Music Copyright Society of China, the copyright agency said yesterday. How much will be paid for each download has not been revealed.

The agreement between Baidu and the copyright society is meant to establish a "strategic partnership" to protect and advance the development of legal digital music on the Internet in China, the society's statement said.

The announcement came just days after Baidu removed 2.8 million unauthorized literary works from its document-sharing site Baidu Wenku, after a group of Chinese authors complained the Internet company was distributing their works without permission.

The company apologized to the authors and said it was seeking possible arrangements with the authors to distribute their works and share the revenue.

For years, Baidu has been accused of facilitating the distribution of unlicensed materials by linking to third-party pirate websites, a practice that helps it gain traffic and advertising revenue but also put it on a list of "notorious markets" for piracy in a recent United States government report.

The latest compensation agreement only covers songwriters and fee issues with record labels will have to be made under a different agreement, according to a Baidu spokesman.

The music copyright society had been pushing Baidu to protect copyright holders for years and had taken legal action against the company until the two sides sat down last November to work out the latest agreement.

Hu Yanping, director of the Data Center of China Internet, said that, at present, he could not think of an ideal ultimate solution for digital material copyright protection but the latest agreement between Baidu and the copyright association was constructive and to be welcomed.

"At least no Chinese Internet company has done anything like this before," Hu wrote on his microblog.