Taobao and Foreign Publishers Join Hands to Combat Online Copyright Infringement
On 31 August 2011, Taobao (taobao.com) and the Alliance for the Protection of Copyright of Foreign Publishers signed in Beijing a memorandum of cooperation on collaborative efforts to safeguard IP rights relating to online shopping.
Formed last March, the Alliance for the Protection of Copyright of Foreign Publishers is a union comprised of some major foreign publishers' representatives in China. It now has ten member publishers including Elsevier, IEEE, Pearson, Oxford University Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.
Taobao.com, launched in 2003 as part of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has now risen to be China’s largest online shopping website, claiming over 370 million users as of the end of 2010. However, alongside with its growing popularity, the website found itself increasingly plagued by the issue of becoming a platform for pirated and counterfeit goods.
With a common goal of fighting online piracy, Taobao and the Alliance have their cooperation dated back to last December, when five members of the Alliance and Information Security Department of Taobao joined hands to conduct a campaign against copyright infringement on taobao.com. The action resulted in 997 infringing items being deleted from its online offerings and 411 penalties imposed on the sellers concerned.
