Punish counterfeiters like drunk drivers, urges Alibaba boss
Billionaire Alibaba founder Jack Ma wants China’s legislators to come down harder on fake goods — the same plea voiced by global brands that have accused the e-commerce service of harbouring knock-offs.
The Alibaba chairman appealed to the National People’s Congress convening in Beijing this week to penalise counterfeiters as harshly as drunk drivers. In an open letter published on his Weibo account on Tuesday, Ma said enforcement had been too lax and the authorities should raise maximum jail sentences and other penalties to deter illegal profiteers.
The unusual public entreaty follows persistent criticism that Ma and his company have not done enough to swat copycats.
In a major embarrassment, Alibaba was again labelled a “notorious market” last year by the US Office of the Trade Representative — just four years after shedding the label. The trade list includes torrent website Pirate Bay and flea markets from Brazil to Nigeria.
“We need to fight counterfeits the same way we fight drunk driving,” Ma wrote in his letter. “No one company can do it alone. The existing laws are lagging, failing to impose actual threats on the behaviour of counterfeiters and leave far too much room for cheating.”
Winning the trust of foreign brands is key to realising Ma’s ambitions of global expansion. But Alibaba still fends off accusations about its unwillingness or inability to eradicate fakes from its platforms, the subject of a 2015 lawsuit filed by Kering.
The Chinese e-commerce company says it is doing all it can to take down fakes. It removed 380-million product listings and closed about 180,000 stores on its Taobao platform in the 12 months to August 2016, the company said in a letter to the US Office of the Trade Representative.
In this week’s missive, Ma said knock-offs remained rampant throughout the country as a result of inaction by the authorities. He even compared ridding China of fakes to fighting the famed Battle on Shangganling Mountain, where Chinese forces were said to have beaten back the US and South Korean military during the Korean War.
“Alibaba’s shifting the burden to legislators and it might help drive some changes in China’s criminal legal system,” said Cao Lei, director of the China E-Commerce Research Centre in Hangzhou. “They hope to use a few cases to kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.”
Outdated laws — such as ones dismissing criminal responsibility for manufacturers who produce goods worth less than 50,000 yuan (about R934,000) — had rendered Alibaba’s own efforts to curb counterfeits futile, Ma argued.
Fewer than 10% of the leads the company had provided to authorities led to a successful criminal prosecution, he said.
“There is a lot of bark around stopping counterfeits, but no bite,” Ma said.
THE PUBLIC ENTREATY FOLLOWS PERSISTENT CRITICISM THAT MA AND HIS FIRM HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH TO SWAT COPYCATS