Various news outlets have reported that Gougou.com, one of China's most notorious pirate search engine sites, has shut down. The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) recently listed Gougou.com in December’s Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets, stating that Gougou.com “continues to actively provide users with deeplinks to infringing music files and torrent links from unauthorized sources.”
According to the report, Gougou.com and sites like it were selected for inclusion on the list “because their scale and popularity can cause economic harm to U.S. and other IPR rights holders.” The U.S. Government recently estimated that industries that depend on intellectual property rights (IPR) protection support as many as 40 million American jobs, and up to 60 percent of U.S. exports.
As Ambassador Kirk noted when the report was first published, piracy and counterfeiting hurt the U.S. economy, harm our creative and innovative industries, and pose a threat to middle-class American jobs. As such, USTR hopes that the Notorious Markets Review will continue to yield the kind of concrete action from highlighted markets that led to the removal of several markets from the list in 2012.
To read the full report, visit this link.
For more information on intellectual property rights protection, or to report IPR infringement, visit http://www.stopfakes.gov.
