Alibaba has filed a civil suit against two men who sold fake Vans-branded shoes on its Taobao platform.
The infringement suit is the latest in a series the e-commerce giant has filed this year to aggressively pursue purveyors of fake good who violate trading rules on Alibaba’s Taobao platform. Alibaba’s stance is that criminal penalties need to be more severe and punitive to deter repeat offenses and is pursuing civil cases to inflict pain on bad actors.
“The current crackdown is like a sieve. The punishments from criminal judgments are too low and not enough to deter the lucrative counterfeiting industry chain,” said Jessie Zheng, Alibaba Group’s chief platform governance officer.
Alibaba has asked the court in the Chinese city of Yiwu for RMB530,000 in damages and a public apology to be published in Chinese media. After two hours of testimony last month, one of the two men, who are surnamed Zhang and Xie, admitted to breaking Taobao’s trading rules and offered to settle. Alibaba declined the offer and will seek a ruling from the judge, which will come at a later date.
The two men were caught by police on April 13, 2016 in a rental house filled with hundreds of pairs of fake shoes.
Alibaba’s pro-active, realtime intellectual property protection measures detected the fake listings started in late 2015, with the sellers offering Vans at around one-quarter the price of authentic branded footwear. The sellers were attempting to route buyers off the Taobao platform for sales, payment and returns to avoid platform supervision and platform complaints. Evidence was handed over to the police in early 2016, and the men were arrested later that year. They were convicted in criminal court in May 2017 of selling fake goods, receiving prison sentences that were mitigated to probation.
Alibaba broke legal ground at the start of the year, filing suit in Shenzhen against two vendors who sold fake Swarovski products on Taobao. It was the first instance of a Chinese e-commerce company seeking civil redress against bad actors, over and above any penalties imposed on them through criminal prosecutions.
Aggressive protection of brands continued during the year, with Alibaba winning a five-month legal battle in a Shanghai civil court in July against a seller of fake cat food under a Mars brand. In May, also in Shanghai, Alibaba sued a seller of fake Wuliangye-branded spirits for violating platform rules and infringement. Wuliangye is a well-known premium spirits brand in China.
