French firms target eBay in anti-counterfeit drive
Published August 19th, 2006
A French industry group plans to file a complaint with prosecutors seeking damages from eBay Inc. 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 Inc. and Japan’s Rakuten Inc..
But the main focus is eBay, with which Unifab has held more than a dozen meetings in the last two years, Jamet said.
‘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,’ he said.
‘We think they have the IT to manage their sites, to track bank accounts and ownership.’
EBay spokesman Hani Duzry said the company operates an anti-counterfeit goods program and constantly monitors auctions for blatantly infringing products and removes them.
‘We don’t allow counterfeit items on the site. It is against eBay policy. It is illegal. We are committed to working with copyright owners on this,’ Duzry said.
Ebay ‘makes it easy,’ he said, for any copyright owner to contact eBay to report infringing products in order to have eBay remove them.
Jamet said, however, that the firm had refused Unifab’s request to pro-actively shut down merchants of counterfeit goods in the same way it agreed in 2001 to ban listings of Nazi memorabilia and from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Unifab’s complaint will contain concrete examples of counterfeit goods found for sale on the Internet, he said.
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