Asia IP

With the end of November looming, China’s State Administration of Industry and Commerce’s (SAIC) annual online piracy crackdown campaign – called the Red Shield Net Sword Campaign (红盾网剑专项行动) – is nearing its end for the year. The campaign, which was launched in July, promised to take a heavy hand against online sales of counterfeit and sub-par goods, by targeting mainly infringements on e-commerce platforms.

According to the SAIC notice, the SAIC – and AICs at local levels – focussed the campaign on the following points:

• Enhancing inspection over operators of online stores to ensure operators register their real identity with online sales platforms and show their business license on their online stores if they are registered companies.

• Increasing supervision and scrutiny over online sales of goods that are frequently counterfeited, including electronics, automobile parts, clothing and accessories, etc.

• Strengthening supervision and regulation over online-sales-platform operators to ensure they are performing their legal duties, including the review of the identity of online-store operators, the inspection of product quality, the efficiency and availability of notice-andtake- down procedures, etc.

According to Li Min, a professional support lawyer at Hogan Lovells in Shanghai, China’s online protection of IP is better than ever before, but given the serious online infringement resulting from a combination of economic, political and cultural causes, China still has a long way to go compared with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan.

Therefore, IP owners may consider the following additional measures to combat online piracy or infringement apart from reporting to the administrative authorities:

• Adopt anti-counterfeiting technologies or digital protection measures on their products;

• Educate customers to be able to identify counterfeit products and encourage them to report the counterfeit products they find;

• Monitor repetitive online infringers closely;

• Send takedown notices to onlinesales- platform operators and/or ceaseand- desist letters to online infringers directly;

• File civil action against online infringers if necessary.

“We expect the 2015 campaign will attack or deter counterfeit and other illegal business conduct online more efficiently than the 2014 campaign, as the 2015 campaign extended the scope of the action to [include] the inspection over business operators concerning disclosure of their real identity to onlinesales- platform operators or disclosure of the their business licenses at their online stores [and] cooperation with and stronger regulation over online-salesplatform operators. Said additional efforts will make it easier for authorities and IP owners to identify the infringers and take down illegal products online,” said Li.