The 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.
اضافة اعلان
The administration said the activities caused significant
financial losses for
US 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 U.S. 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 manufacture them, part of the administration’s focus on how trade
impacts workers. Because these businesses operate outside the law,
counterfeiting and piracy often go hand in hand with unsafe working conditions,
child labor, forced labor and other issues, the USTR said.
“Counterfeit manufacturing often occurs in clandestine work
places outside the reach of labor market regulations and inspection systems,
which increases the vulnerability of workers to exploitative labor practices,”
the report said.
The report will result in no immediate penalties for the named
companies, though it said the goal of publishing such a list was to “motivate
appropriate action by the private sector and governments.”
Congress is mulling some actions that could clamp down on
Chinese e-commerce sales to the United States, including of counterfeit goods,
as part of a major legislative effort at promoting U.S. economic
competitiveness with China.
One provision, proposed by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., would raise
the threshold for the dollar value of a good that can come into the United
States duty-free from certain countries, namely China.
That level, called de minimis, is set at $800 in the United
States. That is far above the level in many other countries, a policy that
critics say has led to an explosion of imported e-commerce packages, including
some unsafe and illicit goods.
Read More
Region & World
.jpg)
.jpg)
