A court in Beijing on Wednesday opened the trial on search engine giant Baidu Inc's lawsuit against Qihoo 360 Technology Co, China's leading anti-virus software provider, for unfair competition, the Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday.

Baidu claimed Qihoo 360 had violated the robots.txt protocol, an industry convention to tell cooperating search engines what information they can snatch from websites, and copied Baidu's website content. The search firm is asking for a compensation of 100 million yuan ($16.38 million) from Qihoo 360, the report said.

Qihoo 360 responded that the website content had been provided by Internet users, and the company has not infringed on Baidu's intellectual property rights, according to the report.