Luxury Brand Burberry Wins Lawsuit against Counterfeit Network

Pictured: The distinctive Burberry plaid

Luxury British brand Burberry was awarded $100 million in damages this week in a New York Federal court  extensive counterfeiting network. According to Women’s Wear Daily, a cartel of Chinese websites using the Burberry name to sell counterfeit, aka fake,  Burberry goods were fined and found guilty of trademark infringement.

What’s most interesting to me about this judgement is that the law is starting to catch up with trademark infringement via the Internet and social media. This is reflected in the court’s decision where Burberry was awarded not just money damages, but also the domain names of the fakers. Yes, they get to take over sites like yesburberryvision.com and buyburberry.com  that were trading on their brand name to sell the fakes. According to the decision, Burberry can,  “hold third-party hosts; payment processors; search engines, such as Google, and social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, accountable for associating with the infringing sites,” note’s Women’s Wear Daily citing the opinion. If a site is found to be in working with counterfeiters Burberry can also take action to stop those sites from showing up in website search results. Now that’s powerful!  Go Burberry.

This precedent setting case is going to severely affect the activities of counterfeiters as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and zero budget Social Media have been their biggest form of marketing and advertising.  Of course, it’s going to take a diligent trademark attorney to do all the cyber sleuthing to find the infringers. I’m sure they have many tricks.

For me, spotting fake Burberry in person has been one of these easier fakes to peg as counterfeit. Many times the distinctive plaids are misaligned at the seams. The fakes handbags always stink of glue, and the fake clothing seems to be sized in smaller, almost like children’s sizing rather than women’s.  Of course, on the Internet, you don’t get to see all that.  But hey, if you see a poorly designed web site selling low priced Buirberry with descriptions in broken English, that’s a dead giveaway.

I assume as much as Burberry won here, that they also must have considerable legal fees from bringing the lawsuit to court. Maybe at some point they, and all luxury brands, should take the money and create some lower priced goods, especially Burberry handbags and really put their counterfeiters out of the market. If the goods weren’t so pricey, then the fakes wouldn’t have market, right?