Jack Ma is wrong, counterfeits do have a place at Alibaba (at least for now)

Say what you will about Jack Ma, but the man is never boring. Just a week after he said counterfeits and fakes were “better quality” than real brands, he’s written an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal stating in no uncertain terms that he didn’t mean that the way people interpreted it. Its title: Counterfeit goods have no place at Alibaba.”

In the article, he writes:

Counterfeit goods are absolutely unacceptable, and brands and their intellectual property must be protected. Alibaba is only interested in supporting those manufacturers who innovate and invest in their own brands. We have zero tolerance for those who rip off other people’s intellectual property.

Failing to protect original designs, trademarks and technology is akin to thievery, and it is detrimental not only to innovation but also to the integrity of the marketplace. We do not and will never condone any act of stealing.

Alibaba is 100% committed to leading the fight against global counterfeiting, online and offline. We have devoted an unparalleled level of technology, capital and people toward our anticounterfeiting work. Our robust data processing and analytics enable real-time scanning of over 10 million new product listings a day, looking at product attributes such as trademark, pricing, geolocation, buyer and seller identity, consumer feedback and more. For every one takedown request we receive from a brand, we have proactively removed eight.

I like Alibaba, and I like Jack Ma (most journalists do; he’s a walking fountain of great quotes). But if I were the representative of a global brand, I think I’d find this article infuriating. Jack Ma has been saying the same kind of thing for years, but Alibaba still has a problem with fakes.

To be clear: things have gotten a lot better. The first time I used Taobao, which was probably back in 2007 or 2008, counterfeit goods were absolutely everywhere. Now, some types of counterfeits really do seem to be gone, and others require a little digging. But they’re still there, and they’re not hard to find at all.

On Taobao for example, here’s some unlicensed club soccer shirts and some unlicensed national soccer shirts. Here are some unlicensed Lakers hats. Here’s a DVD player that’s marketed as being able to play pirated movies. Here are a bunch of probably-pirated Xbox 360 games. Here’s a Titanic blu-ray that costs less than $1. Et cetera.

Counterfeits do have a place at Alibaba, albeit a shrinking one.

Alibaba’s other services, like AliExpress, also have problems. Here are dozens of unlicensed Manchester United jerseys. Here are two pairs of Asics running shoes that cost about half what they ought to. Here’s a knock-off handbag that’s clearly pretending to be by Louis Vuitton. Et cetera.

Again, to be clear, it’s obvious that Alibaba is trying to address this stuff. If it were not, we wouldn’t see any change at all, but that isn’t the case – the situation has clearly improved quite a bit. Also, it’s possible that some of the items I listed above are the genuine article (I am judging based primarily on suspiciously low prices).

But it’s also clear that counterfeits do have a place at Alibaba, albeit a shrinking one. Whatever Ma or the company’s other executives and PR reps can say about its efforts to stamp out piracy, the fact remains that I found all of the items above in about half an hour of casual searching. I’d challenge you to find that many sketchy-looking items in that timeframe on a platform like Amazon, or even eBay for that matter.