Alibaba Site Among 'Notorious' IP Markets in USTR 2017 List
Alibaba's Taobao.com mobile commerce site, the Pacific Mall in Markham, Ontario, and online sites like Convert2mp3.net and ThePirateBay.org are among prominent physical and virtual marketplaces that facilitate or ignore rampant piracy and counterfeiting, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) said Friday in its annual notorious markets report. Citing growth of illicit streaming devices globally, USTR added several apps and portals that link such devices to illicit content -- TVPlus, TVBrowser and Kuaikan -- to the list. It said closer cooperation between governments and stakeholders is needed to tackle such video streaming piracy. Alibaba and mall management didn't comment.
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The content company-founded Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment -- which last week brought copyright infringement claims against companies behind the Dragon Box streaming media player (see 1801110031) -- emailed us Friday that beyond litigation, it also "supports voluntary, private-sector initiatives [among various stakeholders] to reduce illicit conduct and promote healthy online commerce. ... All stand to benefit when creativity is respected online and reducing the growth of streaming piracy requires coordination among all parties."
Pointing to the report, MPAA said it "rightly shines a much-needed spotlight on this specific type of notorious market." Identifying piracy markets "is a vital tool to help rights holders in their quest to develop legal services and markets," the International Intellectual Property Alliance said. It said the list "helps foreign governments identify online piracy operations ... and guides the U.S. government in engaging our trading partners in cooperative efforts to open their markets to licensed distribution of U.S. creative materials.”
The online markets on the USTR list also include the cyberlockers 1Fichier.com, 4Shared.com and Dopefile.pk; the e-commerce platform DHGate.com; the third-party server Firestorm-Servers.com; and streaming service Gostream.is. Other physical markets on the list include Buenos Aires' La Salada; the Pacific Mall in Markham, Ontario; Tank Road in Delhi, India; the Mangga Dua market in Jakarta, Indonesia; the Mercato del venerdi market in Ventimiglia, Italy; and the El Tepito market in Mexico City. USTR said the goal of the list is to "motivate appropriate action" by those markets and by governments. It said some of the markets listed host both legitimate and unauthorized activities, while others involve solely infringing activity.
The report included some successes against parties that were on the 2016 list, including a 2017 guilty plea in federal court by the operator of Sharebeast. USTR said a variety of sites that used the Sharebeast platform and had been nominated for inclusion on the list have reportedly shut down. It said YouTube-mp3.com shuttered due to civil litigation (see 1709070012). It said after four years on the list, ExtraTorrent was removed this year, as operators announced in 2017 it was shutting down.
USTR said Argentina and Thailand "significantly stepped up "enforcement to tackle physical marketplaces. It said January 2017 saw 2,000 illegal street vendors evicted from the Once neighborhood of Buenos Aires, with the government then relocating them to commercial facilities and providing them small business training. USTR said Thai authorities carried out more than 700 raids in the first nine months of 2017, seizing close to 150,00 infringing items. It said Thai authorities also set up on-site IP Enforcement Centers in several shopping areas to increase visibility and speed up responses to complaints.
It said Alibaba has taken a variety of positive steps, such as a one-stop site for takedown requests across all its platforms and removal of 230,000 Taobao.com vendors for selling IP-infringing goods. USTR recommends the company include a broader ban on commonly counterfeited items, such as auto parts, and ensuring criminal leads provided to Chinese authorities result in meaningful enforcement.