I contacted the Ninghai Excellence Commodity Co, Ltd. from their email on Alibaba and I am happy to report that Lily Hu from the company responded quickly.
Lily said that they would remove the counterfeit product from their website. I hope Infringer Blacklist will eventually become a reference for the good traders, distributors and manufacturers out there. As of today, Ninghai goes on the good list.
Okay, this is really getting old. Every single day I have to contact Alibaba.com to take down infringers from their site. They continue to say that they are just a middleman and they don’t have control over their own site. Really? The law says that if you have counterfeiters on your site you must take them down. But this is happening every single day.
As soon as one counterfeiter is removed another one is right back up. Like cockroaches.
I heard from Wendy in the U.S. office and we are going to have a conversation next week. I don’t think this is ever going to stop and I frankly don’t have the time to constantly spend my time doing nothing except monitoring their site for infringers.
Since it looks like it is never going to end, I’m afraid the only way to put a nail in the coffin is to take this to court. I would like to settle it another way, but Alibaba shows no signs that they respect intellectual property.
I’ve been dealing with this company for years, but for now it looks like they have taken down the counterfeiters from their website. With all counterfeiting, you have to constantly monitor the Internet to make sure.
Though you can never control everything, you can make sure thieves don’t have your product on the major sites. They would have too much to lose if their entire site was banned by Google.
The first step is to ask nicely. And if that doesn’t work you start reporting it to the search engines and their hosting companies. Let them deal with it. A second warning to sites that allow counterfeit products on their site is dealt with more harshly.
After my trade dress for swiggies was issued, I thought my problems with Alibaba were over. But apparently they don’t seem to understand or care about intellectual property rights. Unlike their competition, Trade Key, who removed infringers and have never again put them back up on their website, Alibaba refuges to deal with this.
Just 2 weeks after having all infringers taken down they were back up again on the Alibaba.com site. I’ve also sent cease and desist notices out to several companies and will wait to see their response before I post them here.
Sometimes people simply aren’t aware that they are selling counterfeit products. But once they have been notified, all counterfeit items should be taken down.
I will keep you updated on what happens.
I was happy to hear that ICE and Homeland Security has seized 70 websites that were selling illegal counterfeit merchandise. This was all part of Project Copy Cat, an iteration of Operation in Our Sites. The counterfeit merchandise was sold on websites that so closely resembled the real sites that it was almost impossible to tell them apart.
The websites have been shut down and the domains are in the custody of the US government. If you visit the websites now you will simply see a banner that tells customers the site has been seized, along with information on counterfeit products and their dangers, since counterfeit companies don’t care about quality or hazardous materials.
Normally you wouldn’t see an SSL certificate, but this time the sites also had those on them, which collected credit card and personal information on customers.
As an intellectual property holder I can tell you that it’s a huge problem and it’s not just money we are losing. It’s also the reputation of the brand name when counterfeiters cause harm through their actions. I hope this is just the beginning of a major crackdown on counterfeiters.
I sen an email to Chinaonsale.com to let them know that they had counterfeit versions of my wrist water bottle product on their site. I got a very quick response from Amber to let me know that she was removing them from their site.
The first thing any IP owner should do is to contact the infringing company to let them know what they have on their site is infringing your intellectual property. Quite often they aren’t aware of it and will remove it.
Start off nice. If it doesn’t come off or you don’t get a response, you can be a little more harsh. If they persist or don’t respond after that you need to take it to the next level with the search engines and their hosting.
I’m eventually going to put together a naughty and nice list. Chinaonsale.com…you go on the nice list.
I sent an email to Tina Lee, the sales manager at Promotional Promo, that there was a counterfeit product on their site. She emailed me back quickly and removed the infringing product from the website.
Sometimes companies don’t know that they are being sold a counterfeit product. Thanks to Tina for being one of the “good” guys.
I would like to think that China will finally do something about counterfeiting, but I have plenty of doubt:
article by Fraser Smith
The Chinese government has launched a new crackdown on product piracy after continued pressure from Western governments.
Announcing the move at a press conference, a deputy commerce minister, Jiang Zengwei promised closer cooperation with the United States, Japan and Europe.
The crackdown comes after the World Trade Organisationsided with the USA in January in a complaint that China wasn’t doing enough to enforce patents, copyright and trademarks. The World Trade Organisation decision could open the doors to allow the US to claim compensation from China and even to impose trade sanctions.
When most of us think about product piracy in China, we usually think about software, DVDs, luxurybrand name goods and the ubiquitous watch salesmen hawking their wares wherever tourists are found. However, there is a far more serious side to the matter with a growth in the fake medicine market. American officials say fake Chinese-made heart and anti-cancer drugs have been found as far away as Africa.
It is not unusual for the Chinese government to announce crackdowns on piracy, but, in the past, these crackdowns have not always been enforced as rigorously as the west would like. There has also been a tendency for the authorities to overlook smalltime offenders or copies of CDs and DVDs, for example, that have not been passed by the state censors and are therefore not available through official channels.
In the software market though, the Chinese Government has already met with some success.
After introducing legislation forcing all computers sold in China to be sold with an operating system installed a few years ago, the number of PCs shipped with legitimate software has risen from 88% in 2007 to 98% in 2009.
Fraser Smith is an IT consultant based in Shanghai, China. He has over 15 years experience in the media industry working with many major news publishers. He is also co-owner and editor of edexpat.com the educational resource for international families, teachers and schools. You can contact Fraser via Twitter by following @FrasSmith.
While doing a sweep for my own product, I found an infringer who put a Warner Bros. logo on my bottles. They didn’t have permission to copy my bottles and they didn’t have permission to use their logos.So I contacted WB.
It seems IP infringement doesn’t just happen to the smaller companies. It’s BIG business. Even terrorist groups have gotten into it. It’s truly disgusting.
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