Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Tiffany & Co lost it's lawsuit to hold eBay accountable for the sale of fake Tiffany jewelry. I wonder how RIC will be effected (if at all)? Of course, the legal process is not over yet.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Sullivan in New York said companies such as Tiffany are responsible for policing their trademarks online. He ruled eBay can't be held liable for trademark infringement "based solely on their generalized knowledge that trademark infringement might be occurring on their websites."

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... 94aad.html

RIC already seems to be doing what the Judge says; viz., "...companies such as Tiffany are responsible for policing their trademarks online."

Or is there a rare Tiffany Edition Rickenbacker that I'm not aware of...

Rickenbacker usually deals with the auctions on a case by case basis by notifying Ebay. There aren't dozens at a time typically from what I see. They also seem very speedy in their requests to take the auctions down at Ric's request. Sounds like Tiffany's had a massive amount of fraudulent merchandise on Ebay, which is a lot harder to monitor.

EBay has plunked down tens of millions of dollars on anti-counterfeiting efforts since 2006. It claims to remove about 90% of fraudulent goods from its site within four hours of being notified.

That is actually impressive if it is true considering the sheer volume of auctions going on at all times, although one has to wonder how many companies attempt to monitor all of the auctions every day in an attempt to notify Ebay.

Andrew said it. Tiffany's was expecting eBay to police for them.

Darkhollow wrote:Rickenbacker usually deals with the auctions on a case by case basis by notifying Ebay.

Rickenbacker does notify Ebay--after they've stopped the offending auction. Ebay customers with trademark protection are given the capability to stop auctions immediately, and do the Ebay electronic paperwork later. In extreme cases, the Ebayer's account can be terminated.

However, this is only true of the USA right now; foreign auctions that offend must still be dealt with by notifying Ebay and having them do their own due diligence before the auction is removed.

Really? I thought John and Ben just knew a couple o guys named "Moose" and Rocco" that went around and......oh never mind.

eBay's VERO program is global. On our special account, the browser shows some different options which includes marking auctions for deletion, as well as classifying the infringement and providing comments to eBay and the seller. It's actually pretty simply once you get past the initial paperwork. There's no further paperwork necessary after that as all affidavits are filed electronically. Any owner of intellectual property can obtain such an account.

Interestingly, all of this is actually processed by eBay Switzerland; my guess is that this is to provide them some measure of protection from legal action due to the laws in effect there.

Nevertheless, I do wish Tiffany had prevailed and can only hope they will on appeal, as eBay's assistance is minimal and the procedures were designed intentionally to not be user friendly or otherwise promulgated by brain dead people.

johnhall wrote:......ebay's assistance is minimal and the procedures were designed intentionally to not be user friendly or otherwise promulgated by brain dead people.

I couldn't agree more. Same for Paypal dispute assistance as well.