On March 5^th the USTR announced its regular review of the world's notorious markets, the largest counterfeit and pirated products centres in the world. These comprise physical locations selling hard goods as well as online sites distributing pirated content. China features heavily of course (its AIC head even this week announced how important it was to stem the tide of fakes in China). But many other regions also feature.

 

SE Asia has over time been improving. The Philippines has excitedly announced its removal from the list. However 3 key SE Asian problems remain:

 
in Indonesia Harco Glodok, the consumer goods and electronics market in North Jakarta remains a key centre of counterfeit hard goods, largely imported from China.

Thailand has a number of physical areas of concern including Talad Nat on Wireless Road which is very close to the US Embassy in Bangkok.

Vietnam's zing.vn is primarily a social media site, but continues to provide access links to unauthorized music content. Years of negotiations to legitimize its content distribution have still not yielded results.

Despite the recent growth in online business in the last few years, so far SE Asia has not seen online fake sales take off in the same way as other parts of the world. Only Zing.vn so far has been named as a serious problem.