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, reported AP.
YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based Web giant not to leave China, after it threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks.
The separate projects went up within a day of each other in mid-January, just after Google's threat to leave.
"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."
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 Web site Thursday about the Google and YouTube imitations.
Xiao guessed that based on the amount of time and work needed to build such a site on top of Google's data, Goojje had already 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. The second syllable of "Google" sounds like "older brother," and the second syllable of "Goojje" sounds like "older sister" in Mandarin.
Xiao said if another copycat site like these emerges, it probably would be of Facebook -- which is also blocked in China.
