China’s WeChat, AliExpress Added to US Piracy Market List

The U.S. has added WeChat and online market AliExpress to its list of markets infamous for counterfeiting and piracy, Bloomberg reported.

The annual list highlights the worst intellectual property abusers and counterfeiters. The list has been published since 2011.

Alibaba’s AliExpress and Tencent’s WeChat are “two significant China-based online markets that reportedly facilitate substantial trademark counterfeiting,” the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said in a statement accompanying the release of the 2021 review Thursday (Feb. 17).

The 2021 list has 42 online and 35 physical markets that are reportedly engaging in “substantial” counterfeiting or copyright piracy. According to Robert Holleyman, deputy U.S. trade representative under the Obama administration, the list is useful to get big companies to fight piracy more.

“It leads to sharing of best practices around how companies can deal with what’s going to be an ever increasing challenge, which is the counterfeiters, the bad actors, who are using these platforms,” Holleyman, now the president and chief executive officer of the law firm Crowell and Moring LLP, said in an interview. For counterfeiters, “the tools to evade monitoring and scrutiny continue to grow every year.”

In other news about WeChat, the Chinese company has begun accepting the country’s digital yuan, PYMNTS wrote.

Read more: Chinese Payments Giant WeChat to Accept Digital Yuan

WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app and one of the biggest Chinese payment platforms, could mark a milestone for the digital yuan. Most of the country’s 1.4 billion people use WeChat Pay, if not its rival Alipay, for mobile payments.

According to the People’s Bank of China, the digital yuan could be the backup to the existing payments giants.

“Chinese consumers are so locked in WeChat Pay and Alipay, it’s not realistic to convince them to switch to a new mobile payment app,” said Linghao Bao, an analyst with Trivium China. “So it makes sense for the central bank to team up with WeChat Pay and Alipay as opposed to doing it on its own.”