U.S. Chamber to Publish Rogues Gallery of Pirate Sites
PC Mag
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched a “name and shame” list of sites it says host counterfeit goods and pirated content. First up? A site offering NFL jerseys.
The FightOnlineTheft.com site will feature, on a weekly basis, sites that either illegally offer copyrighted goods or works for download or sale.
“These rogue sites, dedicated to the theft of intellectual property (IP), deceive consumers into purchasing shoddy and frequently dangerous products ranging from household wares and prescriptions, to movies and clothing,” according to the U.S. Chamber’s Global Intellectual Property Center.
The first site is nfljerseysupply.net, which the Chamber claimed originally did business as www.nfljerseysupply.com, a site that was seized as part of the Operation in Our Sites 2.0, the second version of a government takedown of 82 Web sites that the government claimed harbored counterfeit goods and copyright material.
The project is intended to be a resource for legislators, policymakers, and the public to better understand what the rogue sites are and how they impact our economy and well-being, the U.S. Chamber said. About $135 billion has been lost to these sites of the world’s top economies, the Chamber claimed.
PCMag.com could not reach representatives of either the U.S. Chamber or nfljerseysupply.net for comment.
So far, the Chamber hasn’t highlighted direct-download sites as a contributor to piracy, as aJanuary study did. As a whole, the collection of sites which the research firm MarkMonitor classified as “digital piracy” represented 146 million page views per day, or 53 billion page views per year. Even the least-visited sites in the category drove 781 million hits per year, the firm’s study found.
