Piracy website gets ‘support‘ from US government
It's a wildly popular website laden with unlicensed songs and Hollywood movies, a prime exhibit of the digital piracy that is strangling the music industry in Asia and eroding legitimate online sales around the world. But a few clicks inside the free-to-download bonanza that has pushed Vietnam's Zing.vn into the globe's top 550 websites reveals a surprising presence: the American government, which maintains a bustling social media account on the site. Washington is a vocal proponent of intellectual property rights in Vietnam as it is around the world, and a site like Zing would be shut down in the United States. But with space with for public diplomacy limited in Communist Vietnam, the embassy's uses its "Zingme" account to reach out to young people in Vietnam as it seeks to build closer ties with its former enemy. The embassy presence shows just how mainstream pirate sites have become in Vietnam, where the government does nothing ...