This week the the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issued its latest “Review of Notorious Markets” list of companies that are deemed serious sources of piracy and counterfeiting across the globe. While numerous Chinese companies remain on the list Baidu, Inc. ((ADR) NASDAQ: BIDU), China’s largest search engine, has been removed.
According to the press release from USTR, “Baidu, one of the world’s most visited sites and previously identified as an example of a site linking to infringing content, [was released from the list] for entering into a licensing agreement with U.S. and other rights holders in the recording industry.” Specifically Baidu reached an agreement in July of this year with the top three record labels — Sony, Universal Music, and Warner Music Group — to start compensating them for music distributed their platform.
“Piracy and counterfeiting continue to present a serious challenge to the innovation and creativity that is essential to supporting American jobs and creating economic growth around the world. The notorious markets highlighted in this review negatively impact legitimate businesses and industries of all sizes that rely on intellectual property to protect their goods and services. We hope that this review will continue to yield the kind of concrete action from highlighted markets that led to the removal of several markets from the list this year.”
– Ron Kirk, United States Trade Representative
Despite Baidu’s removal from the list, it is clear that China is still a large source of digital piracy and physical counterfeit goods. Most notably Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace and Taobao Mall two of China’s largest e-commerce companies in the C2Cand B2C markets respectively, remain on the list for the second time this year despite their “significant efforts” to address the problems.
You can view the full list of global “notorious market” companies or just check out our highlights of Chinese digital media and technology companies from the list:
Share and Enjoy:Linking: These are online services engaged in “deep linking” to allegedly infringing material that is often stored on third-party hosting sites. [Baidu had been in this category in the March 2011 report but it took steps to address its infringement and has now been replaced by two smaller upstart Chinese search engines.]
- Sogou MP3: China-based Sogou MP3 reportedly provides easy access to deeplinks of music files for downloading or streaming, and reportedly ignores rights holders’ notices to take down infringing material.
- Gougou: Industry reports that this China-based website actively provides users with deeplinks to infringing music files and torrent links from unauthorized sources.
B2B and B2C: Commenters has reported that these Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) websites offer a wide range of infringing products (such as cigarettes, clothing, manufactured goods, pharmaceutical products and sporting goods) to consumers and businesses. [Taobao was also listed in this category in the last report in March 2011.]
- Taobao: Several commenters reported that pirated and counterfeit goods continue to be widely available on China-based Taobao. While stakeholders report that Taobao continues to make significant efforts to address the problem, they recognize that much remains to be done. Taobao was recently listed as one of the top 16 most visited sites in the world, and one of the top three most visited sites in China, according to rankings published at Alexa.com.
Unlicensed Programming Retransmission: Includes live sports telecast piracy, affects amateur and professional sports leagues and other television programming rights holders by making protected telecasts and broadcasts freely available, without authorization, over the Internet. [TV Ants was also listed in this category in the last report in March 2011.]
- TV Ants: This peer-to-peer service, which reportedly operates from China, exemplifies this problem.
Physical Markets: Sales of counterfeit goods in physical store locations. [PC Malls (China) was also listed in this category in the last report in March 2011.]
- PC Malls (China): Right holders report that the Buynow PC Mall, a very large personal computer mall chain in China, operating 22 stores across the country, is known for selling computers with illegal operating system software and other unlawfully re-installed software.
