The BBC reports that the US Trade Representative added Gougou.com to its report and commented: ‘This Chinese-based site facilitates the downloading and distribution of pirated music and movies, not only through deep-linking services, but also by offering cyberlocker facilities and through its own innovative high-speed P2P [peer-to-peer] file-sharing system.

Legitimate streaming

The site was run by Chinese internet firm Xunlei, which had planned to float on one of the US stock exchanges until abandoning the idea in the face of piracy allegations.
According to the Tech Asia web site – which described the Gougou service as ‘China's most notorious search engine’ -- Xunlei is keen to become a legitimate video-streaming company, and the closure of Gougou could be a part of a ‘cleaning up’ scheme.

WiFi settlement

Elsewhere, struggling BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion has forked out €50m to Finnish rival Nokia to settle a patent dispute concerning WiFi networking, the Financial Times newspaper reports.
Nokia filed lawsuits against the Canadian company in the UK, Canada and the US in November, looking to enforce a Swedish arbitration ruling.
If the ruling had been upheld, RIM could have been forced to stop selling WiFi enabled handsets in those markets.
According to the report, the companies announced they had reached a settlement ‘of all patent litigation between the companies’ on 21 December, but only revealed the terms this week.