Alibaba, Sohu Win US Anti-Piracy Nod 阿里巴巴、搜狐被从美国盗版名单上移除
Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba and web portal Sohu (Nasdaq: SOHU) won a major victory last week when web sites operated by both were removed from an annual US list of companies that facilitate rampant piracy. The victory came after both firms made efforts to aggressively police their sites and quickly remove any pirated or counterfeit materials. While the companies should be commended for their effort, the achievement came with an important footnote that shows there is still work to be done.
To obtain the victory, both Alibaba and Sohu launched major lobbying campaigns costing millions of dollars. Such campaigns, while common in the US, underscore the fact that Chinese companies tend to responded more aggressively to anti-piracy pressure from big global names. By comparison, similar complaints from domestic players usually fail to get the same urgent response.
Alibaba and Sohu basked in the light of positive headlines last week when Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace and Sohu’s Sogou search engine were both removed from the US Trade Representative’s office’s latest list of “notorious markets” for pirated goods. Their victory followed the removal of leading search engine Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) from the list a year earlier. The removal of all three companies is part of a broader campaign by Beijing to wean the country’s many companies from a practice that stifles innovation and costs product developers billions of dollars in lost sales each year. Chinese companies with global aspirations also realize they must first clean up their acts before they can be taken seriously in overseas markets.
In a nod to that fact, Alibaba launched a high profile public relations campaign to have its name removed from the “notorious” list, including its hiring of a former high-level official from the US Trade Representative’s office. It won another major ally in September, when Alibaba and the major Hollywood studios formed an anti-piracy alliance.
But many of the same Chinese companies that have worked so hard to win respect from the US have shown far less interest in giving the same assistance to Chinese product developers that also suffer huge economic losses from piracy but are relatively cash-poor and have little or no clout in either Washington or Beijing.
That relative disregard was on display in September, when Baidu successfully convinced a Beijing judge that it had only limited liability in a case where illegal copies of literature were available on one of its sites. In that case, Baidu argued its liability should be limited since its site was merely a trading platform, and that it did not actively promote the trade of pirated material.
If these Chinese companies want to convince the world that they are really dedicated to fighting piracy, they need to devote equal resources to eliminating all illegally copied goods and materials from their sites, regardless of how rich or powerful the rights holders. Only then will they be able to truly claim a place alongside other major global corporations that have zero tolerance for piracy.
Bottom line: Alibaba and Sohu’s removal from the US “notorious” pirates list marks a major achievement, and now the companies need to give equal protection to domestic Chinese firms.
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