Chapter 9 Legal Deficiencies Highlighted Behind Taobao’s Counterfeit Sales

In a business world, if two people want to trade, what is the biggest transaction cost? It is credit.Credit constitutes the inequality and shielding of all transactions. Alibaba, which Ma Yun started at the beginning, was a trading platform, that is, B2B, which is a transaction between Chinese companies and foreign companies.Later, Taobao was a transaction between consumers and consumers, and Tmall was a transaction between enterprises and consumers.Therefore, the foundation of all platforms of Alibaba Group is credit. Ma Yun has made many important speeches on the integrity of Alibaba: The biggest challenge for China's accession to the WTO is integrity. The first thing an enterprise needs to establish in doing business is integrity. Integrity is the greatest wealth, and it is a problem that today's enterprises, especially Chinese enterprises, must face.

There are five links in e-commerce. The first is the integrity system. Without the integrity system, the cost of Chinese enterprises will not be reduced in the process of doing business forever, but will become higher and higher. A customer-first value means we would rather have no growth than do things that harm our customers, let alone blatant deceit. These words are full of truth. On Alibaba's B2B platform, there is an important product, which Ma Yun named "Chengxintong". This shows how important the word "integrity" is in Jack Ma's view of consciousness! However, in 2011, a crisis of integrity began to envelope Alibaba.In February of this year, an independent report began to circulate on the Internet. The report stated that in the past two years, 2,326 fraudulent companies (the so-called fraudulent companies refer to forged contracts or A company that fabricates a lot of sales information to deceive others). At the end of February, in order to solve this problem, Alibaba announced that Wei Zhe, the executive president of the B2B platform, and Li Xuhui, the CEO, both resigned.This is a very serious executive resignation event in the history of Alibaba.

In April 2011, the U.S. Trade Representative Group released a report saying that Taobao had already ranked among the top 15 fake websites with the highest hit rate in the world.That is to say, the existence of fraudulent companies and counterfeit products in China has become a very prominent event in global trade.At this time, Alibaba is facing a very serious integrity crisis. Also in April of that year, CCTV's "Focus Interview" on April 23 broadcast a special report on the sale of counterfeit goods on Taobao - "Online Shopping - It's Not Easy to Say I Love You".This is the first time that central-level media has exposed Taobao’s sale of counterfeit goods. Two very vivid cases were mentioned in it:

The first case is about a man named Liu Lezhen in Changsha. He wanted to buy a leather bag for his mother online, so he searched and searched on Taobao, and finally found an online store. He found this online store. There are many beautiful bags, and the price is very cheap.But he was afraid, what if he bought a fake?Later, he found out that this online store had participated in Taobao's "Consumer Protection Plan".He thought to himself that since he had participated in the guarantee plan, the goods in this store should be genuine.So he bought the leather bag back, but when he bought it, he found that the leather bag was a fake.

In the second case, a CCTV reporter interviewed a person who was selling fake goods online.He told the CCTV reporter, I thought it would be very difficult to sell fake goods, but I found out that as long as I have an ID card and a bank card, I can open a store on Taobao, and after opening the store, I don’t care if I sell genuine goods. Still selling fakes, no one cares about me.He believes that Taobao has created an opportunity for him to make mistakes. After CCTV's "Focus Interview" was broadcast, it had a great impact on Taobao.com.After that, the media reported two more data.The first data is that in 2010, Taobao handled 14 million disputes over infringing goods; second, Taobao organized a team of 2,400 online anti-counterfeiting volunteers, and this team handled 530,000 counterfeit goods .From these two data, we can see that, first, Taobao is really working hard to deal with the problem of fake products; second, despite such active efforts, there are still so many scam companies and fake products.This makes us can't help but ask a question: Why does Ma Yun seem so helpless and helpless on the issue of cracking down on counterfeiting and anti-fraud?

In fact, Internet shopping has only developed in the world in the last ten years. China and the United States are relatively leading regions in global e-commerce.With the development of Internet commerce, a series of legal and ethical issues have also emerged. There are some very serious problems behind the phenomenon of counterfeiting on Taobao and fraud in the B2B market, two of which are still unsolved to this day. The first question is: Does the platform have to bear the responsibility when the merchant sells counterfeit products? It's a serious problem, but one that doesn't exist in the offline commodity world.For example, a consumer buys a gold necklace in a store in Wangfujing, only to find out that the gold necklace is fake.What should I do in this situation?He can complain directly to the Wangfujing store.So, does the Wangfujing store need to take responsibility?According to China's current "Consumer Rights Protection Law", Wangfujing store should bear the first responsibility.For another example, if a consumer buys fake goods in Hangzhou Sijiqing Clothing Market, can he sue Sijiqing Clothing Market?is allowed.Therefore, in the offline world, whether it is a shopping mall or a market, if consumers buy fake products, the platform must bear the relevant responsibilities.But this is actually a question mark in the Internet world.

There have been two cases.The first case happened 10 years ago, that is, in 2004, the largest jewelry company in the United States, Tiffany (Tiffany) sued eBay (the largest B2C trading market in the United States), saying that there were a bunch of fake Tiffany jewelry in eBay, suspected of selling counterfeit goods, So we must bear the relevant responsibilities.The lawsuit has been fought for three years, and the US court finally made a trial choice in favor of eBay. In the second case, in 2007, eBay finally suffered in Europe.In Europe, there is a large luxury goods company called Louis Vuitton. The Louis Vuitton Group sued eBay in France, saying that eBay was selling counterfeit goods of the Louis Vuitton Group (Louis Vuitton owns LV, Givenchy, etc.) and Dior and other brands), requiring eBay to assume relevant responsibilities.The result of this lawsuit was that the European Court ruled that eBay should pay a fine of 61 million US dollars to the Louis Vuitton group.These are two cases that occurred in the United States and Europe respectively.

In China, until now, there has not been a single legal trial case that the platform needs to bear the main responsibility in the process of merchants selling counterfeit goods.It can be said that this is an empty shortcoming of Chinese law in this regard.