Date: Friday, October 19, 2007
Should Businesses Pursue Trademark Infringement?
Last March, Google’s YouTube were hit by a $1billion lawsuit by Viacom, owners of Dreamworks and Paramount, for copyright infringement. Currently, Google have a policy of removing all copyrighted clips they find but with thousands of films posted every day, it has proven almost impossible for them to effectively police the site.
However, it isn’t just media companies who have been angered by Internet copyright infringement. Auction site eBay is populated by thousands of fake designer goods, which are proving to be of great annoyance to a number of luxury lifestyle brands. The goods, which can range from designer fashion and accessories to electrical items, are usually sold as the genuine product with trademarked logos and designs copied in explicit detail. Rolex and Tiffany are two companies who decided to go after eBay for providing a platform for pirates to sell these fakes, which they argued caused damage to their brand and affected their sales. As you’ll soon see, these two cases had very different outcomes.
In 2001, Rolex were the first to attack eBay by filing a lawsuit that claimed they were facilitating the sale of fake watches. Rolex lost their case but just a few years later, Tiffany proved to be more successful. In the 2004 Tiffany trial, lawyers managed to prove that around 73% of all Tiffany goods listed on the auction site were fakes. The evidence was strong enough to convince judges to force eBay to remove all fake Tiffany items from their site. However, Tiffany’s success was unusual because, as Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer Gill Grassie wrote in The Times, “Middle men are generally immune from prosecution provided they remove infringing material from their sites as soon as they are notified.”
In fact, as well as most of these cases having an unsuccessful outcome, businesses that go after ‘middle men’ companies such as eBay may find also find themselves hit with a countersuit. The countersuit would provide the middle man company with damages for a loss of revenue on the infringed items and possibly even defamation.
Although brands may feel they are doing the right thing by pursuing middle man sites, current IP law means that they have little to gain by doing so.
Source:
Times
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