Alibaba takes lead in protection of IP
E-commerce giant Alibaba Group has created an institute for intellectual property, as World Intellectual Property Day arrives on Thursday. The institute aims to help establish new rules for IP protection in the age of the internet and globalization.
Through the practical experience of fighting those who sell knockoff products on Taobao, Alibaba’s online shopping platform, over the past two years, the group found that the traditional way of cracking down on counterfeiters was no longer effective because e-commerce has developed at high speed, Sun Jungong, vice-president of Alibaba, said in an interview with China Daily on Wednesday.
“We hope the institute will work as a platform to involve lawmaking and law-enforcing agencies, law professors, domestic and foreign experts in IP protection and those from platform governance and legal affairs departments of Alibaba to look at problems that e-commerce platforms encounter, and to find solutions,” Sun said when the institute was announced on Friday.
“The ultimate goal of the institute is to find new rules in the e-commerce environment, while looking at the successful experiences and lessons learned in different countries, to safeguard the legal rights and interests of each participant in international business and trade and to promote a renaissance in the global economy,” he said.
Over the last two years, Alibaba has used big data technology to stamp out counterfeit goods on Taobao. It scanned nearly 2 billion commodities on the platform every day to spot questionable ones, as well as 600 million pictures that online dealers provide to show their products.
Last year the group tipped off police to about 1,900 cases involving the production or sale of knockoffs, which resulted in enforcement actions that caught more than 1,600 suspects, according to Alibaba. The amount of money involved in the cases totaled 430 million yuan ($68 million).
One typical problem is that IP protection is confined to geographical regions, which means the protection of a trademark in different countries or regions varies, Sun said.
“However, in the field of e-commerce — especially cross-border e-commerce with the progress of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Electronic World Trade Platform put forward by Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, two years ago — the traditional theories in IP protection face challenges and we should consider the need to abandon the old rules and form new ones,” he said.
Liu Xiaochun, executive director of the Internet Law Research Center at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: “Alibaba spotted problems on the front line of online business practices. A summary of such problems is helpful for the establishment of a supervision system from the bottom up, especially when laws and regulations in this field lag behind the times.”
Dong Xuebing, deputy director of Zhejiang University’s China Academy of West Region Development, said such an institute will follow an approach that leads to innovative systems, which will help China better play on the world stage.
“Alibaba’s experience in intellectual property protection is worth a summary, and I believe it may finally push forward changes in national laws and regulations,” Dong said.