A French court on Friday ordered online auction site eBay to pay 80,000 euros (118,000 dollars) to Louis Vuitton for selling fake luxury perfumes, LVMH said.
“The court found that in using key words from certain LVMH brands, eBay had commited several acts of counterfeiting,” LVMH said in a statement.
— Read more at EBay fined again for selling fake Louis Vuitton goods online at France 24.
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How can eBay be held responsible? Unless they are refusing to remove auctions or sellers that are known counterfeiters? How can they bar eBay from selling whole brands of goods without proving that they’re all counterfeit?
yeah, how can ebay be held responsible for individual sellers who are selling fakes unless they are knowingly allowing it….and how could anyone PROVE that they knew? If Ebay is required to authenticate every item sold on its site—I can’t imagine what that would do to listing fees! Isn’t the first rule of ebay “buyer beware”? Maybe Ebay then goes after the offending sellers….
The news stories on this are not clear, but I think LVMH’s point is that eBay uses the names of their perfumes in their on-site advertising — in other words, they’re saying “Look, we’ve got Dior perfumes”, and then taking customers to things that might or might not be real Dior perfumes.
WOW! I’m assuming this may affect only Ebay.fr? Maybe it will have a ripple effect on Ebay.com?
I may cry rivers of tears if Ebay halts the selling of Guerlain, Dior, and Kenzo. Waaaah!
It’s only France, but also, I don’t think this ruling says they cant’ sell LVMH perfumes, only that they can’t advertise them (use them as keywords, really).
The Internet is like the Wild West right now. There are so few laws that can apply to this nebulous universe. Did anyone hear about that woman – and her co-worker – who posed as a young teenage boy in a chatroom. She was chatting up one of her daughter’s schoolmates, trying to find out if the girl was talking/gossiping about her daughter. Evidently whatever she said online to this girl caused the teenager to hang herself in her closet. The case went to court – twice I think – and thrown out both times. This woman got away with this because they couldn’t find any laws that would stick in an Internet situation. I think all lawsuits that are happening right now involving the Internet are also efforts to establish some laws that will help in future Internet cases.
Except it’s a little different when counterfeit goods are being sold. Clear intellectual property law applies. (My college roommate works as counsel for Burberry NA and they spend a lot of time and effort going after fake goods on eBay and elsewhere.)
That’s interesting and a good point, Joe. Thanks for sharing. I actually would love to be a fly on the wall inside these boardrooms and courtrooms where these laws are being written and these lawsuits are being tried. Although for as long as the e-commerce has been active, I think they need to step it up a bit!
So, does eBay pretty much turn a blind eye to counterfeiters or do they remove listings and ban serial offenders?
The brands say they ignore them, eBay says they try to get rid of obviously counterfeit listings.
My (sad) experience has been that eBay does make some effort to protect the buyer, but it is by no means an ironclad guarantee, and this certainly doesn’t help the manufacturer of luxury goods. If a seller misrepresents something as “genuine (Louis Vuitton, Ed Hardy, whatever)”, the honest ones (or the ones who don’t want to be caught in a fraud) will accept the return of the item. You just have to be very clear about requiring postage reimbursement both ways. If a seller won’t do that, or even if they will, buyers can report the seller to both eBay’s and Paypal’s fraud departments, who can bar the seller or censure them in other ways. They may also reimburse the buyer. It seems that it would be difficult to check individual listings for fraud on a regular basis, since the system only reacts to customer identification of counterfeits (which you can’t always tell from photos). While I’ve had some problems resolved this way, I never checked to see if the seller was still selling on eBay, so I’m not even sure if they actually remove the sellers. It would be pretty pathetic, though, if eBay turned a blind eye to “Buy It Now–genuine Louis Vuitton makeup case, only $5.99!”
In the old days at least, it was pretty darned hard to remove a seller. And I know from perfume alone that many just come back w/ a different name and start all over again.
The last time checked, Ebay still allows the sale of “decants”. Now wasn’t this suppose to have been banned?
They don’t allow it, they just don’t manage to police every single one.