Alibaba VP hails anti-counterfeiting success
New figures on Alibaba’s anti-counterfeiting policies have cemented its status as a leader in IP rights (IPR) protection but significant challenges remain, the Chinese e-commerce company has claimed.
In an interview with WIPR, Alibaba’s vice president and head of global IP enforcement Matthew Bassiur said that the company’s 2018 IPR Annual Report, published May 16, highlighted the success of Alibaba’s “three core pillars” to enforcing IP on its platform.
According to the report, 96% of notice and takedown requests to Alibaba were processed within 24 hours in 2018. Bassiur said this proved the success of the company’s IP Protection (IPP) portal.
The portal is what Bassiur called Alibaba’s “one stop shop” to IPR enforcement, through which notice and takedown requests are processed.
The effectiveness of the notice and takedown procedure feeds into Alibaba’s proactive monitoring and removal system, Bassiur said.
“The algorithms we are using are learning algorithms,” he explained. “The more that a rights holder puts into the IPP portal, the better our algorithms become at understanding how that company is being counterfeited”.
Last year, Alibaba removed 96% of infringing listings before a single sale was made, the report said.
The combination of these measures has led to fewer and fewer counterfeit listings on Alibaba’s platforms, according to Bassiur.
The Chinese company made 67% fewer proactive removals in 2018, while rights holders submitted 32% fewer takedown notices.
“Rights holders didn’t forget to enforce their IP; in fact, they’re more aggressive now than they’ve ever been,” he said. “They’re just finding less and less infringing listings on our platforms”.
“Those are the statistics that we want to see and they’re being backed up and corroborated in our meetings with rights owners and governments,” Bassiur added.
Yet the success of these online enforcement measures did not mask the need to tackle the root source of counterfeit goods, the Alibaba VP said.
“What’s it important to understand is that the online environment is reflective of the offline reality,” Bassiur explained. “Alibaba believes that it’s our job to help authorities go after manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors in the offline space.”
According to the report, Alibaba referred 1,634 IP-related leads to law enforcement authorities in 2018, predominantly in China. These leads led to the arrest of 1,934 criminal suspects.
Bassiur, a former US state and federal attorney, said this was the kind of support he “dreamed about as a prosecutor”.
Given these successes, what challenges remain in terms of anti-counterfeiting systems on e-commerce platforms?
Bassiur said that Alibaba is aware it will need to be vigilant against counterfeiters “honing their skills” to get around IPR enforcement systems.
“Any time when you have a crime when the ill-gotten gains are going to be so lucrative and the risk is so low; [a counterfeiter] is going to constantly invest in trying to defeat these anti-counterfeiting systems that companies put in place,” he said.
As well as this, as e-commerce platforms become more and more effective at shutting out counterfeit listings, infringers will inevitably migrate to platforms which are less secure in terms of IPR, Bassiur said.
He described social media platforms and messaging apps as “the next Wild West, in terms of where the counterfeiters are going and where a lot of emphasis needs to be placed”.
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