How to act against illegal copies of your product online

1 February 2021

You do not have to be a multinational enterprise to experience problems online and find other players selling products that are infringing on your IP rights. Infringements do not correlate with the size of a business. The good news is, neither does it require a large company to afford effective anti-counterfeiting actions that can stop infringements.

Today, there are some highly efficient ways to deal with online infringements. Peo Lundquist and Jennifer Godorn, both working with IP protection at Zacco, have helped our client Mora Contract Manufacturing AB (MCM) with these matters. As a result, many infringing copies that were sold on different online marketplaces have now been removed. MCM manufactures a unique snowmobile dollie that is highly appreciated within the client base of snowmobile users. Even though it is a niche market: If you offer a great product, others will try to take advantage of it and start copying it.

Peo Lundquist: -Thanks to a strong IP-portfolio that we have developed together with the client over time, we are able to act both on markets within Europe as well as in North America. These are the key markets for MCM’s product. We used design rights to claim and enforce MCM’s rights in respect to the way the infringing products are shaped.  Since a design right is protecting how something looks it is often easy to spot a potentially infringing product which makes it a great complement to more frequently used IP rights such as patents and trademarks.

Jennifer Godorn: -The client has been facing issues on several well-known marketplaces such as Ebay and on social media. All of the larger online marketplaces have standard procedures that allow right holders to defend their IP, so it does not have to be neither difficult nor costly to act.

Peo: -If you have a product that needs to look in a certain way in order to fit its purpose, or whose design creates an advantage for its use, you will be in a strong position if you can register it as an IP right. Your competitors trying to work around your rights will be forced to invest a lot of effort and money, and may still not get same functionality or appearance.

Jennifer: -Today, there are great solutions for monitoring your intellectual property online. At Zacco, we have scalable services where you can choose to monitor your IP on marketplaces, websites and/or social media. Thanks to the scalability, every business can afford to get a tailored setup in line with their needs. This in combination with a domain name watch will enable you to keep track of and defend your IP rights online.

If you encounter similar issues with copies of your product being sold online without your consent, or if you want to learn more about anti-counterfeiting, please get in touch with Peo Lundquist, Jennifer Godorn or your trusted Zacco IP practitioner.