RELATED ARTICLES |
YouTubecn.com offers videos fromthe real YouTube, which is blocked in China.
TheGoogle imitation is calledGoojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-basedWeb giant not to leave China. It threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks.
The separate projects appeared within a day of each other in mid-January, just after Google’s threat to leave China.
‘‘This should be an issue with Google’s intellectual property, also with China censorship,’’ said Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘‘I cannot see how these sites can survive very long without facing these two issues.’’ Both siteswere stillworkingThursday.
It was not clear what the Chinese authorities would do with them, if anything.
The National Copyright Administration of China has been cracking down on illegally run Web sites and issued a code of ethics this month, but no statement was posted on its Web site Thursday about the Google and YouTube imitations.
Google had little comment. ‘‘The only comment I can give you right nowis just to confirm that we’re not affiliated,’’ Jessica Powell, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message.
China is known for its fake products, but this is the first time such prominent sites have been copied in this way, Mr.
Xiao said.
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.
Some Chinese quickly welcomed the knockoff YouTube site. ‘‘I don’t know if it will last long,’’ wrote the blogger Jia Zhengjing, who has written posts against censorship.
The other site, Goojje, is a working search engine that looks like a combination of Google and its top China competitor, Baidu.
‘‘Exactly speaking, Goojje is not a search engine but a platform for finding friends,’’ one of the founders, Xiao Xuan, told the Henan Business Daily on Wednesday.
He said that the site did not have the level of sensitive material of the copycat YouTube site and that it was probably based on the Google China site instead of the U.S. version.
‘‘It’s quite clean by Chinese censorship standards,’’ he said.
He guessed that based on the amount of time and work needed to build such a site on top of Google’s data, Goojje had been ready before the Google-China showdown started — and that the founder or founders chose the name ‘‘Goojje’’ to get attention.
The names are a play on words. In Mandarin, the second syllable of ‘‘Google’’ sounds like ‘‘older brother,’’ and the second syllable of ‘‘Goojje’’ sounds like ‘‘older sister.’’ Copycat companies are nothing new in China, ‘‘Baidu included,’’ Mr. Xiao, the professor in California, said of China’s most popular search engine.
‘‘The whole idea is following Google.’’ Mr. Xiao said that if another copycat site like these emerged, it would probably be of Facebook, which is also blocked in China.
