Alibaba Lobbies U.S. to Be Kept Off Piracy Blacklist
October 19 2015 - 06:00AM
Dow Jones News
BEIJING—Faced with increasing complaints about the sale of
counterfeits on its websites, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is
lobbying the U.S. government to keep its popular online bazaar and
other trading platforms off its list of markets for pirated
goods.
Alibaba has written to the U.S. Trade Representative's office to
highlight recent efforts to protect intellectual property,
including a new mechanism the company introduced in April that is
aimed at expediting requests from brands for fake merchandise to be
taken off Alibaba's platforms, according to letters posted this
month to a U.S. government website for public viewing.
The two letters were submitted to the USTR as part of the
government agency's annual review of a list of what it calls
"notorious" online and physical marketplaces that reportedly sell
pirated goods. The Alibaba marketplace Taobao had previously been
on the agency's list of problematic markets for pirated goods until
2012, when the USTR removed Taobao from the list, citing Alibaba's
efforts to address complaints by brand owners.
In its letters, Alibaba said it has also implemented more
stringent processes for verifying the identities of sellers on
Taobao, where stolen identities have sometimes been used by sellers
of counterfeit goods. Alibaba also said it has set up an
English-language version of a platform where brand owners can
register their intellectual-property rights and submit complaints
and requests for items to be taken down. Previously, the site was
in Chinese.
The e-commerce giant's efforts to address the problem of fakes
sold on its retail and wholesale online platforms have come under
fresh scrutiny over the past year. A Chinese government regulator
in January accused Alibaba of lax oversight that allowed the sale
of counterfeit goods, accusations which Alibaba called unfair.
Later, the luxury group Kering SA filed a lawsuit in New York
against Alibaba, which said the complaint had no basis. Earlier
this month, a U.S. clothing group urged the U.S. government to once
again label Alibaba's Taobao marketplace a "notorious" market for
fake goods.
The USTR invites written comments from the public and interested
parties as part of the process.
One of the letters Alibaba submitted was a response to comments
sent to the USTR by the American Apparel & Footwear
Association, the anticounterfeiting Trademark Working Group and
Andema, a Spanish intellectual-property-rights protection group. In
it, Alibaba said it didn't believe the comments submitted by the
groups were based on "a fair and accurate assessment of our
e-commerce platforms" and that the company was willing to meet with
the groups to get their input.
The apparel group then submitted another response last week
reiterating its request for Taobao to be reincluded in the USTR's
"notorious-markets" list, saying that the systems and programs
Alibaba cites as improvements are ones the group's members have
said are "incomprehensible, difficult to use and highly
subjective."
Write to Gillian Wong at gillian.wong@wsj.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 19, 2015 05:45 ET (09:45 GMT)
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