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The U.S. adds WeChat and AliExpress to a list of notorious piracy markets.



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Image “The global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods undermines critical U.S. innovation and creativity and harms American workers,” Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, said in a statement.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThe Biden administration on Thursday added WeChat’s e-commerce ecosystem and AliExpress, an e-commerce site owned by Alibaba, to an annual list of markets that the United States says engage in counterfeiting and copyright violations.The administration said the activities caused significant financial losses for American businesses and workers and posed risks to consumer safety last year.The Biden administration also removed from the list several of Amazon’s foreign stores, which the Trump administration had added for the first time to its report released in January last year.The inclusion of Amazon’s stores in Britain, Canada, France, Germany and India prompted an outcry from the company, which claimed that its inclusion was driven by a “personal vendetta” on behalf of the Trump administration, despite consumer complaints about fake products on the platform.The new report, released by the Office of the United States Trade Representative on Thursday morning, identified 42 online markets and 35 physical markets that sold or eased trade in a wide array of counterfeit or pirated goods, including fake Nike products, pirated books and academic papers, music files and virtual items like video games.The list included several major Chinese e-commerce businesses, like Taobao, an e-commerce site owned by Alibaba; DHGate, a business-to-business e-commerce platform; and Baidu Wangpan, a cloud storage service that allows users to share pirated movies, TV shows and books.The trade representative said some countries had made progress in cracking down on the sale of counterfeit goods, including Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. It also said it had documented a shift of pirated goods from physical marketplaces to online, in part because of the effect of the pandemic at depressing global tourism.The report also identified a new ecosystem: “piracy-as-a-service,” in which operators offer website templates, databases of infringed video content or other features that make it easy for customers to set up pirate operations.“The global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods undermines critical U.S. innovation and creativity and harms American workers,” Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, said in a statement. “This illicit trade also increases the vulnerability of workers involved in the manufacturing of counterfeit goods to exploitative labor practices, and the counterfeit goods can pose significant risks to the health and safety of consumers and workers around the world.”The report also examined the impact of counterfeit goods on the people who m …

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