The development of e-commerce is like Pandora's box, which once opened, brings many unexpected results. With the development of technology and the iteration of the market, e-commerce has become more and more an indispensable part of people's lives, but on the other hand, on the e-commerce platform, fakes have always been a stubborn disease that cannot be eliminated. Compared with offline purchase scenarios, the problem of counterfeit goods in e-commerce is extremely difficult for both consumers and merchants.
In fact, as early as 2018, the E-Commerce Law of the People's Republic of China clearly stipulated the obligations and rights of e-commerce platforms to combat counterfeiting, pointing out that platforms have the obligation to review the goods operated on the platform. E-commerce platforms have successively launched a series of anti-counterfeiting measures. However, the quality of goods purchased online is still severe, and with the emergence of new forms of e-commerce such as live streaming, the problem of counterfeit goods in e-commerce has attracted more widespread attention.
According to the more than 1,000 sampled goods tested by the China Consumers Association in 2020, the failure rate of online products was 38.70%, which was significantly higher than that of offline.
Now, three years later, has the problem of fake e-commerce products improved?
In March this year, Wuliangye's official website issued a statement saying that the company received inquiries from many consumers about the authenticity of Wuliangye products purchased from the "Pinduoduo" platform at low prices. After verification by the company, the Wuliangye products sold in many stores on the platform are counterfeit. Wuliangye said that it will continue to investigate the sales of counterfeit Wuliangye products by e-commerce platforms such as "Pinduoduo", and once such illegal stores are discovered, it will take administrative reports, complaints or judicial channels to seriously investigate the legal responsibilities of illegal stores and at-fault e-commerce platforms, so as to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of consumers.
Behind Wuliangye's public accountability, it not only reflects the penetration and proliferation of counterfeit goods in multiple channels, but also highlights the difficulties of brand anti-counterfeiting in the Internet era. What is the situation of counterfeit goods in e-commerce today, and will the iteration of technology improve the damage of counterfeit goods to brands and markets? This question is still worth pondering.
The problem of anti-counterfeiting after the rise of emerging platforms
"We opened a store on an e-commerce platform, not for sales, but mainly to fight counterfeiting. According to Li Di, the founder of a clothing brand.
In the face of today's white label, most brands have a headache, and consumers are also full of confusion. Why do 400 products sold on Taobao only cost 70 yuan on another platform?
According to Li Di, many brands will choose to do OEM in factories, and OEM products often have certain defects. These defective products, which should have been destroyed, have become the "tail goods" in the mouth of the manufacturer. They look very similar to the original, with subtle flaws that are not easy to detect, and on the product page of the e-commerce website, even the product introduction pictures are exactly the same as the original product, but the price is often only 1/5 of the original product, or even lower. "It's almost fatal for a small brand. ”
In order to solve this problem, Li Di hired a special person to fight counterfeiting, and also cooperated with professional anti-counterfeiting companies. "In this environment, it will be more and more difficult to be an OEM brand, because it is very difficult to really control the factory and let them not sell defective products. ”
In addition to controlling the factory, it is more difficult to communicate with the platform. The anti-counterfeiting mechanism of mature platforms is often relatively sound, while most of the emerging platforms have not yet begun to systematically solve this problem. Not only have the emerging platforms never communicated with the enterprise about the intellectual property protection measures, but even when the enterprise complains about infringement to the platform, it takes out the trademark property right certificate issued by the state, but it cannot be recognized by the platform.
According to Gao Ji, senior legal director of Bubble Mart, online complaints and reports are often not effective, and there will still be businesses who are obsessed or have a fluke mentality, so better protection can be achieved through civil litigation, administrative investigation and even criminal accusation.
However, from the perspective of the platform, Gao Ji also understands that the platform has its own operation strategy, and it is impossible to forcibly close a store because it has sold fake once or many times. Mainstream platforms can reduce the profits of counterfeiters by restricting exposure and deducting margins, thereby curbing the continuous breeding of counterfeit sales and trying to protect the rights and interests of brands.
However, for companies like Pop Mart, infringement is mainly governed by copyright and other related laws. As things stand, there is still a long way to go before this expectation can be realized. According to the "safe harbor" principle, when a copyright infringement case occurs, when the ISP (Internet Service Provider) only provides space services and does not produce web content, if the ISP is notified of the infringement, it has an obligation to delete it, otherwise it is considered infringement.
Therefore, the platform's approach is that it will not take the initiative to deal with the sale of counterfeits on weekdays, and will only deal with it when the company sues.
Brand counterfeiting tends to lose money
Cracking down on counterfeiting is difficult for small and medium-sized brands, and it is also difficult for well-known brands.
According to the 2023 Intellectual Property Protection Work Report released by Pop Mart, in 2023, Pop Mart will initiate more than 900 rights protection lawsuits, of which 200 cases will be closed. In addition, nearly 33,000 infringing pieces of content were terminated or deleted by reporting and complaining.
As a commodity with second-hand circulation value, Pop Mart has a particularly deep understanding of this difficulty. There are often consumers who swear that the doll in their hands is genuine, and then resell the second-hand goods to another consumer, and consumer disputes occur in the purchase and sale transaction, which will also make consumers have a negative evaluation of the brand.
But the bigger impact comes from the counterfeiters who make and sell counterfeits. According to Gao Ji, some of the cases he has handled have even opened in his own three-bedroom apartment. One room is used for sleeping, and the other two rooms are used as workshops. "Our crackdown on counterfeiting is not just aimed at individuals or enterprises, but mainly on the seriousness of the infringement facts. ”
But in fact, it is very difficult to really find these fake teams hidden underwater. Nowadays, there are various sales channels, and brands need to inspect various e-commerce platforms, social platforms and communities at any time, and need to investigate and grasp the basic information of the infringement suspects and infringement facts before they can effectively obtain the support of law enforcement agencies.
But trying to find out such a person is really like looking for a needle in a haystack. Formal e-commerce platforms often have a sound system and attach importance to the protection of intellectual property rights. As long as the brand finds clues and has transaction records as evidence, it can obtain the support of the platform with reasonable evidence and impose certain penalties on the infringer.
But once the transaction is in the private domain, it is much more troublesome. Nowadays, many infringers have begun to use major platforms to direct interested users to private domain transactions. This method is often very secretive, and it is even more difficult for social software to obtain chat history, order data, and sales of a certain account through official channels for the protection of personal information.
Even if the brand complains to the platform with conclusive evidence of counterfeit sales, it often only closes the account in the end. As for whether the counterfeit seller will re-register with a new mobile phone number and reopen again, the platform cannot completely stop it.
In this regard, Gao Ji, who has been engaged in intellectual property protection for many years, has already had a full psychological construction. After all, the closure of an account means that the counterfeiter loses all the fans, community and traffic resources accumulated by the account, which also limits its ability to continue to violate the law to a certain extent. ”
However, although there are many problems in the fight against counterfeiting in e-commerce and private domains, it is still a drop in the bucket compared with live broadcast sales.
In the traditional e-commerce model, each product has a page, and the order transaction has a transaction snapshot, and each step is archived and traceable.
Live streams, on the other hand, are barely archived. Therefore, it has become a headache for brands to find out the counterfeiters in the live broadcast channel and leave evidence.
While some platforms can provide months of live content archives, it takes a lot of effort to find evidence from the archives that the product is a counterfeit, and it still takes a lot of effort to watch it frame by frame.
In addition to the difficulty of collecting evidence during the live broadcast process, there are also many ways to avoid censorship in the description of the order link. In the traditional e-commerce model, the product needs to be accurately described in order to be searched by consumers, but in the live broadcast mode, users only need to be told to click the corresponding link to guide them to place an order. Therefore, imitation trendy toys can be labeled as cute dolls, dolls, etc., or even car or home accessories, and the pictures have nothing to do with the products sold.
Therefore, for brands, anti-counterfeiting is a job with a very low input-output ratio.
According to industry insiders, such cases require a large number of legal personnel, lawyers, long-term and large-scale evidence collection work, frequent court appearances and litigation. Compared with the hard work and various costs paid, the amount of compensation awarded in such infringement cases is often very low, "If you really want to settle the account, the amount of compensation obtained is often unable to support the cost of rights protection, and the brand needs to invest in employee costs, lawyer fees, notary fees, travel expenses and other expenses."
In the paper "Research on the Economic Logic and Influencing Factors of E-commerce Platform Anti-counterfeiting", the motivation of e-commerce platforms to combat counterfeiting has been analyzed as follows: when the market development of e-commerce platforms reaches a certain stage, there is an internal motivation to supervise the fake goods on the platform. This is because the anti-counterfeiting has increased the average value of the platform on the one hand, and on the other hand, it can also attract more consumers and help the platform expand the total number of users.
However, when the sinking market platform is subject to competition from the incumbent platform, the motivation and intensity of the anti-counterfeiting of the sinking platform will be weakened. Therefore, when the competition of e-commerce platforms intensifies, relying only on e-commerce platforms to independently crack down on counterfeiting will not help to improve the quality of goods on the platform, and it is necessary to introduce public supervision, such as strengthening the joint and several liability mechanism of the platform for fake and infringing goods, establishing smoother consumer complaint channels, preventing vicious competition between platforms, etc., to form a coordinated supervision with the e-commerce platform and jointly promote the healthy development of e-commerce.
In this regard, the above paper concludes that the anti-counterfeiting strength of the platform is affected by the characteristics of the platform itself and competitive factors. The social attributes of new e-commerce platforms and subsidies for genuine sellers can enhance the intensity of anti-counterfeiting on the platform, while the competition between e-commerce platforms may weaken the intensity of anti-counterfeiting.
From this point of view, there is no definite answer to whether the "qualitative change" and "quantitative change" of the anti-counterfeiting can form a virtuous circle, and it needs to be comprehensively analyzed in combination with the characteristics of its own development in reality. (This article was first published on Titanium Media APP, author | Xie Xuan, editor - Fang Yu)