Tech Groups, Allies Warn USTR of Continued Foreign P2P, Cyberlocker Piracy

(see 1602080061), 1602090053 and here). Comments on USTR's so-called Special 301 report on countries that infringe on U.S. intellectual property from a group that includes the Entertainment Software Association, MPAA and RIAA cited a September report on cyberlockers, which are centralized file-hosting sites for user-uploaded content and often used to infringe copyrighted material. Online security company NetNames wrote the report, which was commissioned by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a coalition with an advisory board that it said includes union, National Consumers League and tech officials. DCA analyzed 30 cyberlocker sites -- split evenly between streaming and direct download cyberlockers -- saying they collected nearly $100 million in revenue in the past year. Cyberlockers, P2P networks and various physical locations across the globe are havens for piracy and copyright infringement, said the International Intellectual Property Alliance, with members including ESA, the Independent Film & Television Alliance, MPAA and RIAA. “Online content theft poses a significant and ever-evolving challenge,” it said. “Content thieves are taking advantage of a wide constellation of easy-to-use, consumer-friendly online technologies such as direct download and streaming cyberlockers, which, in turn, have given rise to a lucrative form of secondary infringement on the part of ‘linking sites’ that index stolen movie and television content hosted on other sites.” Alibaba-owned Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce company that had faced scrutiny for infringing goods, said it removed 99.23 million allegedly infringing website listings between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30. Almost 94 percent of those takedowns were done “proactively,” it said. More than 33 percent of the takedowns were a result of a “special” campaign between Taobao and 1,208 copyright holders in the U.S., it said. That campaign resulted in penalties for more than 200,000 Taobao merchants, it said. Time Warner's HBO Latin America, meanwhile, focused on the region. It said "many Caribbean and Central American governments often fail to enforce HBO LA’s copyrights and licenses, permitting piracy of HBO LA’s IP [intellectual property] without legal consequence." The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers also said Caribbean countries and China don't always respect IP rights: "Unfortunately, there has been little progress over the past year in the conditions that ASCAP’s members face in these markets."