Louis Vuitton (LVMH) are to sue three Chinese merchants convicted of selling counterfeit Louis Vuitton products on Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace.
LVMH signed an agreement with Taobao in 2013 to fight fakes on their websites. LVMH also introduced hard to copy labels (similar to bar codes) to make it easier to differentiate between authentic goods and fakes.
China is of course the home of counterfeiting, it’s almost a national past time. Everything from cars to baby milk, from technology to luxury goods. Entering the world of ecommerce and selling Internationally tends to focus the spot light a lot more than supplying goods to China’s domestic market and times are a changing.
LVMH has a strong record of defending their trade marks and having counterfeit goods taken down from marketplaces. It took six years for eBay and LVMH to finally reach agreement and end their long running legal battle with the company with eBay finally settling in 2014.
Now with three Chinese convictions in 2014, LVMH are suing with the demand that the defendants cease all infringement plus a relatively small (but still significant) compensation of 250,000 yuan (£26,600).
