Alibaba teams with world’s most-copied brands to repel pirates
Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has teamed up with some of the world’s most counterfeited global brands, including Louis Vuitton, Samsung and Swarovski, to fight against copycats.
The collaboration will see Alibaba provide its members with big data and other support that will help them block, identify and even take down listings from its market places such as Tmall and Taobao, that fail to meet certain criteria. Those two sites boast one billion product listings at any given time.
In return, the brands have committed to share their anti-counterfeiting data with Alibaba.
The most powerful weapon against counterfeiting today is data and analytics, and the only way we can win this war is to unite
The move follows a lawsuit filed by the internet powerhouse recently against two vendors selling knock-off Swarovski watches operating from its online shopping bazaar on Taobao, claiming 1.4 million yuan in losses.
Taobao is the retail platform that allows smaller merchants to peddle their items.
“The most powerful weapon against counterfeiting today is data and analytics, and the only way we can win this war is to unite,” said Jessie Zheng, Alibaba’s chief platform governance officer.
“Alibaba welcomes brands and other organisations to join us in what we believe is the world’s first ‘Big Data Anti-Counterfeiting Alliance’.”
In December, the US government returned Taobao to its blacklist of “notorious markets” for hosting fake items, four years after Alibaba lobbied American trade officials to drop the platform from the list.