Shit may hit the fan after French trade group targets eBay over Counterfeits!!!

[mandy]

The companies will ask prosecuters to seek damages and interest from targeted sites eBay, iOffer, and Yahoo.

A French industry group plans to file a complaint with prosecutors seeking damages from eBay and other Internet auction sites for the sale of counterfeit products on their Web pages, the group's chairman said.

Marc Antoine Jamet, chairman of France's Union of Manufacturers (Unifab), told Reuters that the complaint, due to be filed next month, also aims at forcing the sites to clamp down on product pirates.

"There is a continent which makes the fakes, which is China, and there is a continent where they are sold, and that is the Internet," he said.

Other auction sites in the firing line include those run by privately held iOffer.com, Yahoo and Japan's Rakuten...

full article: http://news.com.com/French+firms+target+...07415.html

[mandy]

Out-law has an article on the French trade group's action against eBay:

Auction sites have traditionally been reluctant to monitor auctions because of the huge numbers of items listed, but lawsuits have been brought against them. France was at the centre of one of those in 2001 when it ordered that Yahoo!'s US auction site ban listings of Nazi and Ku Klux Klan related material from being available for sale in France.

"We think eBay is perfectly capable of policing its site, but they offer to take action only after the fact. They refuse to act pre-emptively," Unifab chairman Marc Antoine Jamet told Reuters. "We think they have the IT to manage their sites, to track bank accounts and ownership."...

full article: http://www.out-law.com/page-7214

[mandy]

In related news, Unifab isn't the only French group going taking eBay to task over counterfeits:

The luxury goods industry's determination to stamp out counterfeiting has led to Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior Couture suing Ebay, the online auctioneer, for €37m ($47m, £25m).

It emerged on Wednesday that the two fashion labels began a civil complaint in Paris over the summer in the belief that the products sold on Ebay bearing their names were fakes in the vast majority of cases...

LVMH is understood to want improvements to Ebay's monitoring system, which it believes puts an unfair policing obligation on brand owners rather than the auction site itself...

LVMH has already successfully sued Google, the search engine operator, in France over allegations that it had provided links to sites that sold counterfeit versions of Louis Vuitton products...

full article: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14927804/

Louis Vuitton has filed a $47 million lawsuit against online auction giant eBay for not "doing enough" to stop or stem the sale of counterfeit Vuitton goods on the auction site. It's another example of eBay being called out for not policing its auction site for counterfeit goods trafficking.
If Vuitton were to win this suit, eBay might as well shut down, as there are counterfeit and knockoff goods in just about every possible eBay category. Fraudsters out to make a quick buck have flooded the auction site with low-quality, cheap goods -- which buyers crave, apparently.

full article: http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2006/09/20...s-vuitton/

[regic]

Marketwatch on the French lawsuits:

Their complaint, seeking an estimated $47 million in damages, among other things alleges that nine out of every 10 Vuitton items for sale on eBay are counterfeit...

Also Tuesday, a group of French retailers, known collectively as Unifab, released a letter highly-critical of eBay's counterfeit policing efforts, and which promises to seek legal redress if the problems aren't solved. The group is expected to file a lawsuit against eBay in the next few weeks.

The new legal and public pressure is based on an old argument, namely just who is responsible for all the counterfeit goods that wind up for sale at eBay...

full article: http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/St...newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7B9288F954-E2F0-4EC1-B89E-9EF48EAAF92E%7D&keyword=

[thentavius]

I wonder how long eBay's chant: "it's just a venue" will keep people at bay?

I guess if you're buying a designer bag online, expect it to be fake...

[mandy]

Business Week weighs in on the French lawsuit:

Vuitton joins Tiffany in taking the fight against knock-offs from New York street corners to the virtual universe of online auctions...

If the suit is successful, it could shake the foundations of eBay's longstanding practice of letting buyers and sellers make deals on its site with minimal supervision by the company. "You can imagine what a change that would be to their business model," says Louis S. Ederer, an intellectual-property expert at the law firm of Torys in New York.

EBay is already fighting a similar case filed by jewelry maker Tiffany in 2004 in New York's federal court. Both Tiffany and LVMH say their investigators made test purchases of brand-name items offered for sale on eBay and found the overwhelming majority were phony...

full article: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/co...l+business

[xppman]

[quote author=thentavius link=topic=4816.msg24151#msg24151 date=1158866790]
I wonder how long eBay's chant: "it's just a venue" will keep people at bay?

I guess if you're buying a designer bag online, expect it to be fake...
[/quote]

Shouldn't that read:
I guess if you're buying a designer bag on eBay, the Y or the I expect it to be fake?

[mandy]

BW with more on eBay's counterfeit problem:

VMH can expect a sympathetic hearing in France, where anti-counterfeiting laws are so tough that simply owning a fake Vuitton handbag is punishable by a fine of twice the value of a genuine bag. A French appeals court last June upheld a lower court decision ordering Google Inc. to pay nearly $400,000 in damages to LVMH because the search engine had displayed advertising from merchants selling fake Vuitton goods. Google said after the ruling that it would bar advertisers from buying listings using others' trademarks. Emboldened by that ruling, LVMH now is seeking $50 million in damages from eBay.

What if LVMH wins? One solace for eBay is that French courts are stingy in awarding damages, says Anne Cousin, a Paris-based litigation specialist with the London law firm Denton Wild Sapte. To win the kind of damages it seeks, LVMH would have to document thousands of individual sales of fake items, Cousin says. Yet even if the award were minimal, a French ruling against eBay could have big consequences. The court could, for example, order eBay to remove fakes from its pages worldwide, not only from its French site, on grounds that a France-only fix wouldn't stem the damages suffered by LVMH. "The cost of policing would directly impact eBay's business model," says Thomas Hemnes, an intellectual-property lawyer with the Boston-based GTC Law Group...

full article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...004060.htm

[mandy]

A French court has ordered eBay to pay a hefty 20,000 euros to luxury goods designer Hermes for the online auction house's role in the sale of three counterfeit handbags.

Wednesday's ruling was the first time a French judge has found eBay directly responsible for a fraudulent sale by one of its customers. eBay has long agreed to remove listings found to be illegal, but it has steadfastly contended that the liability for those listings rests solely with the seller. A finding to the contrary, should it become widespread, could prove harmful to eBay's revenue model.

"By selling Hermes bags and branded accessories on the ebay.fr site, and by failing to act within their powers to prevent reprehensible use of the site [eBay and the lister] committed acts of counterfeiting and imitation of French brand names ... to the detriment of Hermes International," the ruling read...

full article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/...it_ruling/

[mandy]

The latest:

The French Court of Appeals today denied eBay’s (EBAY) petition to stay an injunction issued June 30 by a Parisian court that requires eBay to halt all sales of four LVMH (LVMUY) perfumes over any site worldwide that is accessible from France, according to an eBay spokesperson.

An eBay spokesman says the company “will comply as technically and humanly possible” with the injunction while it continues to pursue its appeal of the ruling.

In a statement, LVMH says that today’s denial of the stay “confirms the seriousness of the faults committed by eBay’s sites . . . and confirms the significance of the legal precedent set by the Paris Commercial Court’s Judgment on June 30, 2008.”...

The lower court’s order bans not just sales of counterfeits, but sales of genuine bottles of these perfumes, because LVMH chooses to limit sales of these products to exclusive licensed distributors, and it does not permit its licensed distributors to sell over eBay...

full article: http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/20...ahoo_quote

more:
http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/20...lvmh-case/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/techno....html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=lvmh&st=cse&oref=slogin