Amazon and the BWW Group have successfully filed a joint lawsuit in the European Union Trademark Court in Alicante, Spain, against the trade in counterfeit BMW products. A court has convicted four Spanish residents of trying to sell counterfeit BMW parts and accessories on the online platform across Europe, the two companies said in a joint statement on Thursday. Thus, fraudsters are no longer allowed to offer counterfeit products, must destroy them and pay damages to plaintiffs.
This is the first court success of this kind in Spain achieved by Amazon's Counterfeiting Crime Unit (CCU) and the BMW Group. The fraudsters convicted in the civil case broke the law, violated Amazon policies and disrespected the BMW Group's registered trademarks by attempting to sell counterfeit products such as valve covers, emblems and key fobs. They even provided fake certificates of origin.
European manufacturers lose sales amounting to about 16 billion euros
Amazon detected the suspicious activity using advanced machine learning techniques and worked with the BMW Group to confirm that the products in question were counterfeit. Amazon subsequently blocked the defendant's sales accounts, removed offers related to the case and compensated affected customers on its own initiative.
How serious are those economic ones? The consequences of product piracy are demonstrated by figures released by the European Union Intellectual Property Agency (EUIPO/Alicante) as of January. Accordingly, European manufacturers of clothing, cosmetics and toys lose annual sales of about 16 billion euros due to counterfeit goods. In addition, about 200,000 jobs were lost due to this fraud. One important distribution channel for such goods is online trading.
Amazon confirmed that it takes the problem seriously. “Amazon has zero tolerance for counterfeit products and will lead the fight against counterfeiters wherever they operate,” said Kiparo Smith, president of CCU. Jochen Volkmer, Head of Trademark, Design and Intellectual Property Law at the BMW Group, added that when the two companies combine their skills to identify and combat counterfeit products, it is very successful.
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