South Korea’s dominant portal web operator Naver and Seoul’s Dongdaemun Special Tourist Zone have been included on the European Union’s “watch list” for acts of piracy and counterfeiting, according to a recent report.

The European Commission, with the support of the EU Intellectual Property Office and Europol, published its first-ever watch list last week, naming 52 non-EU websites and marketplaces in more than 20 countries it alleges engage in, facilitate or benefit from piracy.
 

The list included four categories -- online marketplaces offering copyright-protected content, e-commerce platforms, online pharmacies and services providers facilitating medicine sales as well as physical marketplaces.

Naver was listed in the e-commerce platform category, while Dongdaemun Special Tourist Zone was listed under physical marketplace.

The South Korean company has often been criticized for lacking tangible measures to curb transactions involving counterfeit items in its open market platform.

According to the European Chamber of Commerce in Korea, 12 European companies filed some 50,000 deletion requests to Naver in 2017, demanding counterfeit items be removed from the platform.

Other global online platform operators such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba Group had also been mentioned as plausible candidates for the EU watch list, but were excluded as they have actively accommodated corrective measures against counterfeit items, according to the commission.

By Bae Hyun-jung (tellme@heraldcorp.com)