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US Judge Dismisses Part of Alibaba Counterfeit Goods Lawsuit (reuters.com)
Reuters reports: A U.S. judge on Thursday dismissed part of a lawsuit filed last year by Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and other luxury brands accusing Alibaba Group Holding Ltd of promoting the sale of counterfeit goods. U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in Manhattan dismissed racketeering claims asserted by brands owned by Paris-based Kering SA, saying their complaint failed to allege facts that could sustain those claims.Alibaba is not the only company which has been subjected to such accusations. Amazon has been treading the same path, with some sellers even leaving the platform.
I mean, after all it's likely that they came from the same sweatshop that make the "real" ones...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've had the experience on Amazon of buying a product that I was already familiar with from purchasing in a bricks-and-mortar store. I was buying another one as a gift. It was presented on Amazon as being genuine merchandise from the original manufacturer. When it arrived, it was a cheap plastic knockoff that, while functional, was obviously manufactured using different and less material for cost savings and had been through an inferior QA process, so there were a number of pieces that had manufacturing defects. This was not a case of the factory just running more production than the product owner requested. The cost was pretty close to what I had paid in the store, so it wasn't like I was getting a great deal.
If I had been aware that I was buying a knockoff, I could have taken that into consideration. If I was buying this thing for careless children, a knockoff would have been fine. But these dishonest sellers are portraying their products as the real thing, which can damage the reputation of the original company and of legitimate sellers (who get placed into a pool on Amazon when they advertise that they are selling the same product), leads to dissatisfied buyers and poor product reviews, and causes a hassle when the buyer has to go through the process of returning the item as counterfeit.
In another example, there's a seller on Amazon who manufactures and sells a certain kind of high-quality cotton bed sheets. They're having problems with bad product reviews because unscrupulous sellers piggyback on their product description and then ship people crappy polyester sheets. They had great reviews for their first few months of business, and apparently the scammers saw this and decided to get in on it, and the product reviews started plummeting. Also, the scammers become the default sellers of the product because they undercut the legitimate seller on price. This is a relatively small business that's being stunted by junk peddlers, and Amazon is willing to do very little about it. It's up to the consumer to parse the product page and make sure they're picking the correct seller.