The United States has included popular Chinese internet companies AliExpress and WeChat on a list of markets known for selling counterfeit products.
The US Trade Representative's list includes 42 online and 35 physical markets, according to a US media report. AliExpress, part of Alibaba, is also very popular among the Dutch. Another Alibaba service, Taobao, is also on the list, as is its competitor Pinduoduo.
According to the US Trade Representative, rights holders have noticed a “significant increase in the number of counterfeit goods on AliExpress.” This included both products that were “blatantly advertised as counterfeit” and items that were falsely described as genuine. Alibaba and Tencent say in their responses that they are already doing a lot to combat rights violations on their platforms and that they want to cooperate more with the US government.
Combating the sale of counterfeit goods
Through this list, the United States wants to encourage countries to make more efforts to combat the production and sale of counterfeit goods. Americans have long pointed to China as the main source of fake articles.
WeChat, owned by tech giant Tencent, is particularly popular in China and has more than 1.2 billion active users. In addition to the chat service, WeChat also has a marketplace function, but according to the US Trade Representative, sellers there are not properly monitored.
Online piracy
The Trade Representative's list also includes several well-known online piracy sites, including Bittorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, RARBG, RuTracker, 1337x, and the recently defunct Popcorn Time. Illegal streaming sites like Fmovies and Cuevana and file storage services like Uploaded and 2Embed were also mentioned. Other known illegal download sites that appeared on the list are Newalbumreleases.net, Sci-Hub, and Libgen.
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