1 December 2010Copyright

Stefan Krawczyk: eBay

What is your role at the company?

I head the government relations team throughout Europe. That involves a team here in Brussels, doing the EU institution outreach, and government relations specialists in London, Paris and Berlin. Our work involves representing eBay’s interests on a whole range of issues, including on the e-commerce legislation, but also, obviously, any of the IPR issues.

Do eBay's relationships with governments vary across Europe? Is there a difference in your relationships in France and Brussels, for example?

That’s correct. I would go as far as to say that our relations with governments across the board are generally excellent. Now, of course, there is a huge variety of issues on the table. So you don’t deal with one same department, ministry or directorate general all the time. Generally speaking, eBay is a product that really appeals to people. Almost everybody knows about it.

A challenge in this area, I would say, would be in France. My clear impression is that we are still facing some aftershocks of years of negative press and media attention in France, of court cases that have been blown out of proportion, and a constant focus on the negative news.

This stigmatised the company early on—I mean three, four or five years ago. That sticks with people, even though the situation has now completely changed. A lot of this was based on facts that are now out of date. We’ve moved on, and eBay is a different marketplace.

Why France in particular?

I think there’s always a natural tendency to hit on the big foreign players, and not just in France. But in France, it was different because of the litigation that everybody is aware of. eBay is new and a bit disruptive, because we come with a new business model. Some people may even fear that their own, well-protected business models are under threat because of eBay.

What are you doing to address the concerns?

For us, it’s very simple. Our bottom line is as follows: we very, very strongly oppose counterfeiting. We have no interest whatsoever in counterfeiting on our site. It’s very bad for us, firstly because it puts our own reputation at stake, can lead to bad buyer experiences for users, who won’t come back to the site if they have a couple of bad experiences.

We’ve set up a very sophisticated reporting system, known as VeRO, which gives rights owners the tools to report listings of allegedly counterfeit goods to us. If they ever find anything on the site that looks suspicious, they have very sophisticated, automated tools to report those to us and make sure they get removed as soon as possible. Most are removed within four hours. In principle everything is removed with 24 hours.

This is combined with our rights owner relations department, which actively reaches out to rights owners to inform them of the tools at their disposal, but also to work out a solution if there are specific, pervasive problems, where our reporting system may not be enough. Then we work on a one-by-one basis to address the problems with a wider array of tools. We also do a lot proactively ourselves.

How much counterfeit material is sold on eBay?

The only thing we can do is measure what we know of. Our latest data for 2009 has shown that a negligible share of listings is suspicious—less than 0.2 percent. This is based on reports of rights owners and of our community of users, and what we find proactively. In any physical market, such a low level would be a raging success for enforcement. For us, it is evidence that our methods are good, and an incentive to keep our systems in place. Zero counterfeiting is impossible, but we try to get as close as we can.

Is it your responsibility to police counterfeit goods on eBay?

There’s a joint responsibility. We see very clearly that the brand owner is the first responsible for his own brand, for the simple reason that the brand owner is the best expert on the brand. We as eBay can never acquire that expertise. For example, we have more than 30,000 rights owners in our VeRO programme. It’s impossible for us to be an expert in all those products. So we need to work together and that’s what we do.

What is the legal position on this? Is it clear?

For us, it’s clear. There are, however, some judges and courts that still have difficulty understanding how the Internet works and how businesses like eBay work. Our position is clear. We are an e-commerce platform where buyers and sellers come together, where we give them tools to create listings of products—products we never see.

We provide hosting services by providing the platform for others to trade on. If we become aware of specific listings with problems, it is our responsibility to take it down. Any obligation that would go further than that would create a de facto obligation to monitor everything on the site.

Is there anything you’d like to change about the way that brands/legislators approach this issue?

That links into our upcoming response to the e-commerce consultation. We would say don’t change the current e-commerce directive—it’s actually very future-proof. Considering there have been different interpretations, it would be good if the Commission could provide some clarification on elements of the directive that have been subject to different interpretation in the various member states. As for brand owners, we continue to reach out to them to fight counterfeiting in a co-operative manner.

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