July 10th, 2008

A French court has ordered eBay to pay 40 million euros to LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton because the company didn’t do enough to stop sales of counterfeit goods on its site. The court decided that eBay had committed ‘serious errors’ in allowing the sales of fake LVMH goods, and had also violated the sales distribution network set up by Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior Couture and issued a cease and desist order, barring eBay from running advertisements for these perfume and cosmetic brands or risk a fine of 50.000 euros per day. The ruling also prohibits the sale of four perfume brands – Christian Dior, Kenzo, Givency and Guerlain. 

eBay, the world’s largest online auctioneer, said it would lodge an appeal and said the decision was not a victory for copyright law. The appeal will be closely watched by a number of other brands including: Nike, Fred Perry, Lacoste, Burberry and Armani who all consider themselves to be victims of high volume counterfeit sales of their brands through eBay. The biggest area of counterfeiting, after perfumes and bags, is considered to be men’s casualwear, partly because men are not so good at spotting tiny differences in styling or logo that mark out knock-off goods.

Lacoste courtesy of mori chan

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Entry Filed under: Online Retailing, casual wear, famous clothing, mens clothing