goWholesale

can you say "Lame"...what a bunch of lies coming from whitman.

There is no way to tell the good guys from the bad guys until after the "crime" is committed. It is difficult to know who is telling the truth when you don't know the players.

The world’s most famous jewelry company filed suit June 21 (2004) in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York against eBay Inc., the world’s largest online auction site. Tiffany claims eBay facilitates and participates in the counterfeiting, infringement and false advertising of the jewelry company’s federally registered trademarks in violation of the Lanham Act. The Act allows trademark owners to recover damages against infringers.
Filing suit wasn’t a rash decision for Tiffany. The company had approached
California-based eBay several times in the past few years in an effort to thwart potential counterfeiters. But it was unhappy with eBay’s response. And it wasn’t the only one. Other luxury-goods companies, such as Kate Spade and Prada, also have been working to eradicate purveyors of counterfeit goods from eBay.

But experts are unsure whose side the courts will be on in this fight. The case is among the first of its kind in the United States and will set the precedent for other cases, which—depending on the outcome of this case—may follow.

A Bit Of A Tiff
Counterfeit merchandise has been a problem for luxury-goods companies such as Tiffany for years. But online auctioneers have taken the problem to a new level.
When Tiffany first asked eBay in 2002 to stem the flow of counterfeit merchandise, Tiffany says eBay refused. “eBay pretty much just relegated Tiffany to use a standard software program,which it designed to help stop counterfeiters,” Swire says. But he adds it wasn’t enough.
That program, Verified Rights Owner (VeRO), allows companies to search eBay for keywords that could indicate potentially infringing activity. If suspected counterfeiters are found, Tiffany reports them to eBay, which then shuts down the auction. But eBay’s not doing the work. Tiffany is.
According to Swire,Tiffany spends thousands of dollars each month trying to track down these auctions. In fact, Tiffany has two employees who monitor eBay full-time.

In its lawsuit, Tiffany asks the court to force eBay to account for its profits arising from counterfeit sales, and enter a judgment for as much as $1 million for each counterfeit piece of Tiffany merchandise sold on eBay. Tiffany also asks for punitive damages and attorney’s fees.
“I think we have an excellent case,” Swire says. “And I hope the outcome of this case will benefit other companies that I know are suffering similarly.”

Although Tiffany’s case is the first significant lawsuit of its kind in the United States, eBay has managed to get itself out of hotwater in Europe. For instance, Switzerland-based Montres Rolex SA filed two suits in
2001 against eBay in Germany, claiming auctioneers were selling fake Rolex watches. eBay won the first round of that case, but the German Supreme Court currently is deciding whether or not it will revisit the
suit.
Ronald Coleman, partner at Coleman & Weinstein in New York, predicts more suits against eBay both in Europe and the United States because the site serves as the perfect place for counterfeiters to unload their wares. Coleman has represented several clients against eBay in an effort to
persuade the company to assist in halting the sale of counterfeit merchandise. But he says the company always has the same excuse.
“They claim they would be responsible and address the problem, except the number of participants in online auctions is too large,”Coleman says. “It should not be enough for them to say that.”

Going Once...

“But when a company creates a new industry, process or product, that company should live with the consequences,” he adds. “The marketplace eBay has created lends itself to the problem of counterfeiting. And I don’t think those issues have been successfully dealt with by eBay to the extent they need to be.”
Coleman believes the Tiffany suit may pave the way for companies outside the luxury-goods industry as well.
“What Tiffany is doing has the potential to be the proxy for many mid-market brand owners who can’t afford to bring this type of lawsuit against a mammoth company like eBay, but who also are being damaged by the wanton abuse of trade-marks in this context,” he says.

“We are disappointed that Tiffany filed the suit, given that we have cooperated with its brand-protection efforts for several years through our VeRO program,” says Hani Durzi, senior manager of corporate communications at eBay.“Through VeRO, we have worked with Tiffany to develop substantial proactive monitoring efforts and given them the tools to report problem listings, which we promptly remove.
While we will continue to cooperate with Tiffany in these efforts, we will fight the legal action because its claims are without
merit.”

“You have a company that is being damaged by the sale of counterfeit goods baring its name, and another company that is making money on that,” Swire explains.
“There is clearly something wrong with that picture.”

At press time, a court date hadn’t yet been set.