Holiday Shopping and the Specter of Counterfeits
Counterfeits are a year-round business, but the holiday shopping spike tends to draw the attention of customs enforcers and brands seeking to thwart imposters seeking a piece of the estimated more than $140 billion online holiday shopping pie in the U.S.
The problem isn’t so much necessarily whether counterfeiting itself increases around the shopping season, but more a matter of the volume of sales, especially through e-commerce, that raises the odds of knock-offs winding up under the Christmas tree, experts said.
According to Adobe’s holiday predictions for November and December, online holiday shopping in the U.S. will hit $143.7 billion, a roughly 14 percent increase from last year.
“As the year-end comes, and the holiday season begins, I don’t perceive an uptick in [counterfeit] activity,” said David Perry, who co-chairs Blank Rome LLP’s intellectual property and technology practice group. “But it’s natural that because online communications do increase…the holiday season does make the consumer more likely to make a mistake.”
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Amazon, for one, updated its brand registry in 2017, and has drawn in companies seeking to guard against fakes in the marketplace. The registry allows companies with registered trademarks to inform Amazon, which in turn consults with the U.S. trademark office database and the attorneys of record on the trademark to verify it.
Once verified, companies can access a portal to conduct searches for trademarks and products, and report counterfeits or even potentially infringing items that aren’t direct knock-offs, attorneys said.
“It’s never going to be perfect, and for some brands, there seems to be an unending flow of difficulty,” Perry said of Blank Rome on the registry. “But companies are finding it useful.”
"Holiday Shopping and the Specter of Counterfeits," by Sindhu Sundar was published in WWD on December 23, 2019.