Gucci filed claims against three multi-brand retail networks: Lord & Taylor, Sam’s Club and Century 21. Gucci’s representatives maintain that they personally purchased the brand-owned bags from that stores and examined them thoroughly, as a result of which they found falsification of products. The owner of the famous brand wishes to ban sales of fake bags and recover compensation from the infringers.
The US retailers maintain that the fake Gucci bags were delivered to them by their suppliers.
Maxim Volkov, deputy head of the Dispute Resolution department, believes that such strategy will hardly work.
“This is a quite frequent case where products are sold in small lots. It happens that a product which is no longer offered for sale comes to resellers who are selling small volumes of such product.
Certainly, it is much more complicated for brand owners to track such sales than to go to a store holding itself for an authorized brand store and to discover that it is selling counterfeit products.
In Russia we can recover the double value of a counterfeit product, while in USA the triple proceeds of the infringer or triple price of a fake product are recoverable. It is happening more frequently because more and more retail businesses go into the Internet sales.
We can demand a ban on production of counterfeit products and recover compensation form any person involved in the chain. We can also bring claims against the end seller and against the party who sold it the product. But the problem is that the end seller, the store itself can later re-collect, re-charge the costs to the party which had supplied the product to it. Under the Russian law, one cannot go to court and say: “We purchased from those people, come to them”, - Maxim Volkov said.
It is fair to say that Gucci is eager to fight against sales of fake products, although this is complicated by great numbers of copies of brand products worldwide, differences between local laws and difficulties in tracking fake products on the markets, in particular on the online platforms.
For more details please read the article
