French Court Slams eBay (Update)

July 1st, 2008 by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento

Louis Vuitton just can’t stay out of court. Yesterday, a French court slammed eBay with judgment to pay Louis Vuitton roughly $63.1 million in damages for auctioning fake goods. Word from the Wall Street Journal is that there may have been some French kissing going on (i.e.- preferential treatment by the French for the French). According to a WSJ commenter, “Too bad eBay isn’t a German company. Then the French company would have lost the battle.”

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and sister company Christian Dior had accused eBay of not taking the necessary steps to ensure that the accessories sold on its Web site weren’t counterfeit. “It is a major first, because of the principles that it recognizes and the amount sought,” said Pierre Gode, an aide to LVMH president Bernard Arnault. The amount is a significant upward departure from the 20,000 euro judgment that Hermes — another French retailer — won against eBay earlier this month for facilitating the sale of fake Hermès products.

Is eBay flea market?

Back on the home-front (a/k/a the SDNY), a decision is pending in a similar case brought last year against eBay by Tiffany, alleging that eBay has “facilitated the promotion and sale of counterfeit Tiffany goods by providing a forum for, and actually promoting, such sales.” According to Huget, a favorable decision for Tiffany would stretch the U.S. trademark laws to a place they haven’t gone before. “As far as I know,” he said, “no one has found a Web site operator, like eBay, liable for being the host for somebody else’s selling of a counterfeit. The flea market cases haven’t been applied in the Online world yet.”

Incidentally, what ever happened to Nadia Plesner’s cute Louis Vuitton-Darfur t-shirts and posters? According to her site, “she’ll be bag!”

July 2, 2008

Robert Alpert, a litigation partner with Ladas & Parry, the intellectual property law firm in New York, said: “I expect this ruling to encourage a number of other designers to sue eBay as well.” EBay has already been sued by companies such as Rolex, the watchmaker, Tiffany, the jeweller, and L’Oréal, the cosmetics and perfume house, for selling counterfeit goods.