LVMH, owner of luxury brands like Dior and Louis Vuitton, has won a case against Ebay for its role in the sale of fake luxury goods. A French court awarded LVMH compensation of €39 million ($66 million) for damage to brand image and moral harm.
Ebay immediately said it would appeal the ruling.
Ebay says that it is doing all it can through its VeRO (verified rights owners) program which allows trade mark owners to request the removal of counterfeit listings. LVMH disagrees, saying that Ebay profits from the sale of counterfeit goods.
An analogous situation: landlords in countries like the US and Australia are not responsible for their tenants selling counterfeit products, whereas China has taken a hard line and fines landlords (see my earlier post on a Louis Vuitton case). A landlord is under no obligation to kick out a tenant even after that tenant is caught. Arguably, Ebay is in the same position as the landlord of a market.
Should Ebay be responsible for the sale of counterfeit goods online?
Categories: Counterfeiting · Trade marks
Tagged: counterfeit, Dior, Ebay, France, LVMH, trade mark
The victory by luxury goods maker
Louis Vuitton in a
case against a Chinese hotel which leased retail space to a shop selling knockoffs of the French brand shows that there is at least one area where Chinese anti-counterfeiting law is stricter than Australia’s.
The Intermediate Peoples Court in the city of Dongguan in the southern Guangdong province held the hotel liable for its tenant’s activities, and ordered both parties to pay 100,000 yuan in compensation and to stop selling the items and destroy remaining stock.
Louis Vuitton would not have got such a favourable result in Australia or the United States. The Australian Federal Court ruled last year, in another counterfeit case involving the popular French brand, that a market operator is not liable for an infringement by a stallholder.
Under US law, meanwhile, it has been ruled in several cases that a landlord is not responsible for infringements by a tenant unless the landlord knew about them at the time the lease was signed.
In at least this respect, the Chinese are taking a much more aggressive approach to stopping counterfeiting than the Western countries.
Photo credit: AFP
Categories: Counterfeiting
Tagged: china, Counterfeiting, louis vuitton
