Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce website, is in the middle of a disagreement between China’s Ministry of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative (USTR). According to a Jan. 19 Reuters News story, Beijing is objecting to the USTR’s ongoing listing of Taobao as a notorious market for piracy.
During a news conference in Beijing, Shen Danyang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, said that China is “greatly concerned and strongly opposed” to Taobao being singled out as a haven for Chinese vendors selling counterfeit products.
“When referring to Chinese businesses, we noticed that the United States notorious market list would use terms like ‘alleged’ and ‘according to industry information,’ ” Shen said. “With ambiguous terms and no conclusive evidence or detailed analysis, this is very irresponsible and not objective,” Reuters quoted Shen as saying.
The USTR kept Taobao on its November notorious markets list despite the website’s progress in purging its giant online marketplace of vendors selling fake cosmetics, clothing, consumer electronics and other copyright-infringing items.
Taobao’s sister company, B2B website Alibaba.com, was recently dropped from the list after a drive to stem online piracy. The USTR also removed Baidu after the Chinese search-engine giant promised to stop serving up links to pirated music-download sites. Baidu last year began offeringlegitimate music through a licensing agreement with three major record labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Following a major push last year to curb counterfeiting, China’s governmentappears to be annoyed that its efforts, and those of Chinese Internet companies, aren’t getting enough credit from politicians and bureaucrats in Washington. Shen’s remarks came as tough new legislation designed to crack down ononline piracyis making its way through the U.S. Congress.
According to the Reuters story, Shen urged the USTR to “take into account China’s effort for IPR protection and the progress made on it and to make a more comprehensive, more objective, more fair evaluation.”
