Fake Web sites pop up as Goojje, YouTubecn

BEIJING | Imitation Web sites of both Google and YouTube have emerged in China as the country faces off against the real Google over its local operations.

YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is owned by Google and blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based company not to leave China. It threatened to do so earlier this month in a dispute over Web censorship and cyber-attacks.

The separate projects went up within a day of each other in mid-January, just after Google’s threat to leave.

“What’s the reaction in these cases? In the U.S., you have a lawsuit. In China, it’s just ‘eh,’ unless they’re really doing damage to the brand,” said T.R. Harrington, CEO of China-based Darwin Marketing.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that she has told China the United States is concerned about Beijing’s action and its impact on Internet freedoms.

Mrs. Clinton told reporters she brought up tensions about restrictions on Google when she met with her Chinese counterpart in London Thursday. She said the exchange was positive and candid, and that China feels strongly that it does not get credit for what it considers a policy of openness.

The Google and YouTube knockoff sites were still up Thursday.

It wasn’t clear what Chinese authorities would do with them, if anything.

China’s National Copyright Administration has been cracking down on illegally run Web sites and this month issued a code of ethics, but no statement was posted on its site Thursday about the new imitations.

Google had little comment. “The only comment I can give you right now is just to confirm that we’re not affiliated,” spokeswoman Jessica Powell said in an e-mail.

China is infamous for its fake products, but this is the first time such prominent sites have been copied in this way, said Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California.

Mr. Xiao said the sites risk bumping into problems on both sides of the Google-China standoff: It infringes on Google’s intellectual property and gives access to sensitive topics in tightly controlled China. “I cannot see how these sites can survive very long without facing these two issues.”

The creators of the two sites could not be reached Thursday.

“I did this as a public service,” the founder of the YouTube knockoff, Li Senhe, told the Christian Science Monitor in an instant-message conversation. Videos on social unrest in China can be found on the site, which is in English.

The real YouTube was blocked in China in 2008 after videos related to Tibetan unrest were posted there.

Story Continues →