Adidas’s Endless War on Taobao Fakes

Adidas is one of the most famous foreign athletic brands in China, but that status is both a gift and a curse when it comes to Taobao, China’s biggest C2C e-commerce platform. The German company has been battling sellers of fake Adidas shoes and clothes on the site for years, and while the US removed Taobao from its list of notorious IP rights violators last year, a recent China Business report reveals that Adidas is still fighting fakers and in fact has largely given up on trying to eliminate them.

The problems are twofold. First, although taking down the large sellers is often effective — the report quotes a big shop owner who has decided to stop selling fake Adidas shoes after getting a takedown notification and the threat of having his shop closed permanently by Taobao. But smaller vendors can be difficult to find, and when they are found and banned, they pop back up again immediately. The same shop owner told the paper that some people simply register multiple shop IDs at the same time so that if one gets noticed and banned, they can simply move their counterfeit items on to the next shop.

For that reason, Adidas has taken to mostly going after the major shops — the ones that would lose too much in reputation and customer feedback to be able to make the switch. But as for eliminating fake Adidas shoes completely from the site, the China Business article employs a Chinese idiom that seems particularly apt: “Even a prairie fire cannot destroy the grass.” And indeed, no matter how much companies like Adidas do to keep counterfeit versions of their products from popping up on Taobao, there always seem to be more available (as you can see for yourself if you scroll through the search results for “Adidas”). Unless Taobao itself takes a more hardline stance (and maybe creates some way to detect counterfeit vendors automatically) it seems unlikely that Adidas is going to be liberated from its perpetual battle with Taobao fakes anytime soon.

UPDATE: Here’s a statement from Alibaba:

Alibaba Group has continuously demonstrated its commitment to intellectual property protection, including the establishment of formal cooperation with law enforcement agencies in China to jointly tackle the issue both online and also offline; in 2012, Alibaba Group provided information involving 72 brands to law enforcement that resulted in the arrests of 324 suspects from a total of 43 counterfeiting rings. The amount of merchandise involved in the takedowns totaled RMB170 million. Going forward, we will continue to execute a comprehensive multi-pronged approach to protecting intellectual property in collaboration with IP owners and government agencies in an effort to get at the heart of the problem and create a healthy and sustainable online environment.

(China Business via Sina Tech)