Skip to main content

Amazon should take measures for fake products.

 

Amazon Louboutin

Amazon may be responsible for selling counterfeit Louboutin shoes in its store, the EU’s top court has said, in a judgment that observers said will embolden brands frustrated with the volume of knock-off goods sold on the e-commerce giant’s store.

In cases brought in Luxembourg and Belgium in 2019, Louboutin argued that third parties were selling fake versions of the brand’s distinctive red-soled shoes, a protected trademark, to unsuspecting Amazon shoppers.

Asked by those lower courts for its interpretation of the law, the European Court of Justice made a preliminary ruling yesterday that agreed with Louboutin’s concerns that Amazon’s website did not make it clear enough when customers may be purchasing goods from a third party, rather than directly from Amazon.

«I think other brands will have a very close look at this case and say: ‘Hey, maybe we can go down the same route,’» said intellectual property lawyer Fabian Klein from Pinsent Masons. «The direction of the ECJ is pretty clear. Life has got tougher for Amazon».

Amazon’s role in handling and delivering the counterfeit products was of particular significance, the ECJ said, as it blurred the line for consumers in knowing which company they had bought the products from.

Amazon said: «We will study the court’s decision».

The company said that these sellers were responsible for 58 per cent of all units sold on Amazon in October.

«Amazon acted like a department store that allowed unknown third parties to display counterfeit goods on its shelves, which not only led to great confusion among consumers on the origin of the goods but also greatly bolstered the distribution of counterfeit goods,» said Thierry Van Innis, a lawyer for Louboutin.

The company has faced similar complaints in the US, where several state-level judges have deemed Amazon responsible for dangerous products sold by third parties.

www.sba.tax

Comments

  1. Amazon needs to make it super clear which products are sold by Amazon and which are sold by third party sellers. They should also mention that these products (the ones not sold by Amazon) are not verified so they could be fakes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think that a standard phrase agreed upon with the EU Court of Justice should be present on such pages on Amazon. Without it these problems will continue.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

 Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have begun work on «Project Sil­ver­light» sug­gest­ing the high­speed rail scheme might face four addi­tional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces fur­ther delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by min­is­ters to rein in its bal­loon­ing costs. The extra delays to the coun­try’s biggest infra­struc­ture project would mean that it would not be com­pleted until as late as 2045 — 12 years after ori­gin­ally planned. «This is a func­tion of infla­tion; we are hav­ing to find huge sav­ings because the cost of everything the depart­ment is already doing will have become so much more expens­ive by then,» said one gov­ern­ment offi­cial. In Octo­ber, the FT repor­ted that the Treas­ury had asked HS2’s man­age­ment team to identify poten­tial cuts or «scope reduc­tions» to the high-speed line. Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have sub­sequently begun work on Project Sil­ver­light aimed at fi...

Google has launched its Bard chat­bot.

  Google has launched its Bard chat­bot in a move to rival OpenAI’s pop­u­lar Chat­GPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to com­mer­cial­ise gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­no­logy. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to text­based ques­tions, will be run sep­ar­ately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, gen­er­at­ive AI has also been integ­rated into widely used pro­ductiv­ity applic­a­tions, such as Google’s Work­space includ­ing Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 soft­ware, as well as into pop­u­lar apps such as Duolingo, allow­ing mil­lions of people to start inter­act­ing with the tech­no­logy. «We want to get feed­back and gradu­ally phase up the num­ber of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-pres­id­ent of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI tech­no­logy known a...

Doubt on CS's collateral.

  Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...