How to prevent and stop counterfeits from China

By Dan Harris

Our China IP lawyers get a steady stream of emails asking what can be done to stop Chinese companies from selling “knock-offs” of their products. This is really two questions. What can be done to prevent Chinese companies from knocking off your products and what can be done to stop a Chinese company that has already knocked off your product. This post will address both questions.

I.  The Basics For Preventing Counterfeiting. 

Back in the retail stone ages (five or so years ago), when companies would come to my law firm for China trademarks to protect their brand names from Chinese copycats, we would tell them that applying for such a trademark would take about a week, but actually getting the trademark officially registered in China would take more than a year. We would then tell them that until their trademark is registered in China, we would be almost powerless to stop companies in China from using their brand name. Few voiced any concerns with this.

Fast forward a few years and now when one of our China trademark lawyers tells a client that securing a China trademark will take a year, those who sell online (which these days is almost everybody) rightfully get all nervous and want to know what to do in the meantime to protect against copycats. See China and the First to Market Fallacy for how incredibly quickly China companies can and do copy products and get them to market.

Our typical response is to talk about “building IP walls outside China.” If you are selling your product in the United States and in Spain you should focus on protecting those two countries, by among other things, securing trademarks in those two countries as quickly as possible. Though a U.S. or a Spain trademark technically will not give you any trademark protection in China, it can still help in getting offending ads removed from Chinese websites like Alibaba. If “your” product shows up on Alibaba and you have no registered IP, your chances of getting Alibaba or some other Chinese website to take it down are slim. But if you have a registered Chinese trademark that is being infringed by something online your odds of getting that offending ad taken down are good. If you have a Spain trademark and an Alibaba ad clearly targeted at Spanish consumers infringes on your Spain trademark, your odds of getting that ad taken down are not bad, which is a whole lot better odds than if you did not have the Spain trademark at all. The same holds true for the United States.

Of equal importance though is that if you have a Spain trademark on your product you can use that trademark to try to keep the offending product from China from reaching Spain. You can do this by working with Spain’s Customs and Border Protection Bureau, which is authorized to block, detain and seize incoming products that violate Spain and EU intellectual property rights. The United States and virtually all other EU countries have similar procedures. In many countries it makes sense to register your trademark from that country with its Customs office.

Registering your trademarks with China’s Trademark Office is the essential first step for just about any company that is having its product made in China or that faces a counterfeiting threat from China.. See File Your Trademark In China. Now., China: Do Just One Thing. Trademarks, and China’s Changing Trademark Environment. Why You Need To Register Your Trademark Now. Because China is a first-to-file country, until you register a trademark you have no rights in that trademark. But a trademark registration alone will not limit the spread of counterfeit goods. A trademark registration merely gives you the legal capacity to enforce your rights to that mark, and should properly be seen as one of the pieces in an overall strategy.

For any company concerned about counterfeit goods coming from China, the next step should be registering your trademark with Chinese Customs. This is not a legal requirement but a practical one: though China Customs officials have discretion to check every outgoing shipment for trademark infringement against the Trademark Office database, in reality they only check against the Customs database. No separate registration with China Customs means no enforcement by China Customs. See How To Register Your China Trademark With China Customs and China Trademarks: Customs Helps Those Who Help Themselves.

If you register your mark with Customs, they will contact you any time they discover a shipment of possibly infringing goods. At that point you have three working days to request seizure of the goods. Assuming you request seizure (and post a bond), Customs will inspect the goods. If Customs subsequently concludes the goods are infringing, they will invariably either donate the goods to charity (if the infringing mark can be removed) or destroy them entirely. The cost of destruction, and of storing the goods during the inspection process, will be deducted from your bond. Registration with China Customs generally takes three to five months and can only be done after China’s Trademark Office has issued a trademark certificate.

We cannot stress enough the importance of China trademarks and China NNN Agreements for any counterfeit prevention strategy. China patents and China copyrights should be an important part of your counterfeit prevention strategy as well, but in our experience, getting offending goods taken off websites is fastest, easiest and most likely if you have a China trademark. See China and Worldwide: Trademarks Good, Patents Bad. Or as one of our China IP lawyers is always saying: “You can probably survive a Chinese company selling a duplicate of your product and selling it for half of what you charge, but if that duplicate product also can legally use your company and/or brand name on it, you may never recover. A China-centric NNN Agreement works to ensure that your own supplier will not sell your products out its back door. Note that a Western-style NDA Agreement for China will probably decrease your IP protection, not increase it.

II.  The Basics for Stopping China Counterfeiting

I apologize in advance for this portion being U.S. focused. This is somewhat necessary for this portion of this post because so much of it deals with litigation and my law firm has litigators in only the United States and in Spain. And since I am not a licensed Spain lawyer, I will confine my discussion regarding IP litigation against Chinese companies to just the United States. Nonetheless, almost all of what I say below is applicable to varying degrees to most countries outside China, not just the United States.

You just discovered a Chinese company is knocking off your product. What do you do? If you are like most companies, you go to your regular lawyer and ask her what to do and if she is like most U.S. lawyers she probably does not know. So then what? At that point, you or your regular legal counsel should reach out to a lawyer experienced in fighting Chinese counterfeiters and experienced in cross-border litigation. There are a lot of options for going after Chinese counterfeiters and the key is usually choosing the right option or the right combination of options.

The right option is usually going to depend largely on your own individual situation. When one of our international IP litigators gets an email asking us to take on a China counterfeiting matter, we usually fire back with a slew of questions to try to learn more. Below are some of the more common questions we ask.

• What IP registrations do you have and where?
• Do you have any trademarks registered in China? Do you have any trademarks registered in any other country? Are these knock off products using your brand name or your company name or your logo? Do you have trademarks on any of these in China? Elsewhere?
• Please describe your registered trademarks. Is the counterfeiter using any of these?
• Do you believe you have any common law trademarks anywhere? Is the counterfeiter using any of these?
• Do you have any copyrights? Are any of these copyrights registered in China? Are any of these copyrights registered anywhere else?
• Please describe your registered copyrights. Is the counterfeiter using any of these?
• Do you believe you hold any copyrights that are not registered anywhere? Is the counterfeiter using any of these?
• Do you have any patents registered in China? Do you have any patents registered in any other country?
• Please describe your patents. Is the counterfeiter infringing on any of these? If so, how?
• Have you registered your IP with any customs offices in any country? If yes, please describe.
• Do you know anything about the Chinese company you believe to be knocking off your products? Please describe any prior dealings you have had with this company. Do you have any contracts with this company?

Answers to the above questions (and many more) help our international IP litigators figure out how best to proceed. The below are some of the options you might have for pursuing your China-based counterfeiters.

1. Pursuing administrative or litigation relief in China. This might be done administratively, via civil litigation in a Chinese court, or even criminally. If you have a contract with the Chinese company that is counterfeiting your products and that contract calls for arbitration of all disputes, arbitration will be another option for you.
2. Figure out who is importing the counterfeit products. Oftentimes the US importer is closely connected to the company in China that is knocking off your products — like a son or a daughter or a spouse so pressuring or suing the importer often can be effective with the Chinese company as well.
3. Suing Chinese companies in US court usually takes a long time because Hague service of process on Chinese companies is taking a long time, and with the trade war heating up, it’s likely to start taking even longer. It is already at the point where if you do not have a Chinese attorney constantly calling all the right people in China all the time to check on the progress of your Hague service, it probably will never happen. There are though sometimes creative ways to get around Hague Service of Process. On top of this, getting a Chinese court to enforce a US judgment is going to be difficult, if not impossible and the US-China trade war likely will hurt you on this front as well. See China Enforces United States Judgment: This Changes Pretty Much Nothing. This means your suing for damages in a US court will oftentimes not be the right tactic for you to take against a Chinese counterfeiter. But a Chinese counterfeiter in a US court might allow you to seize funds or other assets belonging to the counterfeiter or get an injunction blocking its sales.
4. Official Chinese company records can be goldmines of information that you may be able to use to impress upon the Chinese company the need for it to stop copying your products. This is especially true if those records help you show US connections of the company or its owners or officers or directors.
5. Section 337 cases filed with the International Trade Commission in Washington D.C. can be a great way to stop counterfeit products from entering the United States. See Stopping Infringing Products From China: Section 337 Cases. These cases can be pursued without having to serve the Chinese defendant under the Hague Convention service of process rules.
6. Serving takedown notices on the online sites that are selling the counterfeits of your products can oftentimes be fast and easy and effective, mostly depending on the existence and quality of your IP registrations. See e.g., How To Remove Counterfeits From Alibaba Register Your China IP.

Bottom Line: It’s never too early to take action to prevent Chinese companies from counterfeiting your products. And if you are hit with a counterfeiter, it is critical that you explore and weigh your options carefully.

For more on counterfeit products from China, check out China Counterfeiting: 8 Common Myths