Robert Smith sues over ‘The Cure’ fakes
Legendary frontman says unauthorised vendors are in league with each other on Amazon and eBay | Accused operators said to be “in constant communication” to evade detection.
Robert Smith, the lead singer of British rock band The Cure, is suing several parties over the alleged sale of counterfeit goods associated with the group using bogus identities.
The suit, filed yesterday, January 3, at the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois pursues trademark infringement claims under the Lanham Act against unidentified online retailers.
Smith accuses the as yet unnamed store operators of “acting in concert” to sell unauthorised and unlicensed products that bear infringing versions of The Cure’s trademark, US number 4,476,916.
Influential musical force
Formed in 1978 in West Sussex, the band was considered new wave at its inception, but then had significant influence on the gothic rock subculture in the early 1980s.
The Cure garnered worldwide, mainstream success with albums such as Disintegration and The head on the floor and hit singles such as Friday I’m in love and Boys don’t cry.
Smith says that, for years, he has operated an e-commerce webstore where he promotes and sells genuine The Cure products at shop.thecure.com, including apparel and other merchandise.
Innovative marketing and product designs, combined with the immense popularity of the band has made the trademark famous, according to the suit.
Further, the brand has been extensively promoted and advertised at great expense, with millions of dollars spent on advertising, promoting, and marketing featuring The Cure mark, as well as significant time and other resources, it adds.
Smith holds that in recent years, unauthorised vendors have sold counterfeit versions of the band’s merchandise using seller aliases on online marketplace platforms including Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Alibaba, Wish.com, Walmart, Etsy, DHgate, and Temu.
Such parties, says the complaint, attempt to avoid and mitigate liability by operating under one or more seller aliases to conceal both their identities “and the full scope and interworking of their counterfeiting operation”.
The suit adds that the defendants reside and/or operate in the People’s Republic of China or other foreign jurisdictions “with lax trademark enforcement systems, or redistribute products from the same or similar sources in those locations”.
False identities
Tactics used by defendants to conceal their identities had made it virtually impossible for Smith to learn their true identities and the exact interworking of their counterfeit network, the filing says.
The suit then criticises third party service providers for failing to adequately subject new sellers to verification and confirmation of their identities, allowing counterfeiters to “routinely use false or inaccurate names and addresses when registering with these e-commerce platforms”.
“Counterfeiters hedge against the risk of being caught and having their websites taken down from an e-commerce platform by preemptively establishing multiple virtual store-fronts,” adds Smith.
“Since platforms generally do not require a seller on a third-party marketplace to identify the underlying business entity, counterfeiters can have many different profiles that can appear unrelated even though they are commonly owned and operated.
“E-commerce platforms create bureaucratic or technical hurdles in helping brand owners to locate or identify sources of counterfeits and counterfeiters,” says the complaint.
The suit further notes how stores operating under these seller aliases appear sophisticated and accept payment in US dollars and/or funds from US bank accounts via credit cards, Alipay, Amazon Pay, and/or PayPal.
Many defendants also deceive unknowing consumers by using the mark without authorisation within the content, text, and/or meta tags of their e-commerce stores to attract various search engines crawling the Internet looking for e-commerce stores relevant to consumer searches, adds the filing.
‘Constant communication’
Elsewhere, it notes that other e-commerce stores operating under the seller aliases omit using the mark in the item title to evade enforcement efforts while using strategic item titles and descriptions that will trigger their listings when consumers are searching for products associated with the band.
Even though defendants operate under multiple fictitious aliases, the suit contends that e-commerce stores operating under the aliases often share unique identifiers, such as templates with common design elements that intentionally omit any contact information or other information for identifying defendants or other aliases they operate or use.
These alleged infringers are “in constant communication with each other” and regularly participate in QQ.com chat rooms and through websites such as sellerdefense.cn and kuajingvs.com regarding tactics for “operating multiple accounts, evading detection, pending litigation, and potential new lawsuits”, according to the complaint.
Such stores are alleged to exhibit other notable common features such as use of the same registration patterns, accepted payment methods, check-out methods, keywords, advertising tactics, similarities in price and quantities, the same incorrect grammar and misspellings, and/or the use of the same text and images.
Additionally, the suit holds that the alleged counterfeit products “bear similar irregularities and indicia of being counterfeit to one another”, suggesting that they were manufactured by and come from a common source and that defendants are interrelated.
Law firm Greer Burns & Crain filed the suit on behalf of Smith.
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