The Supreme Court ruled that cheap fakes do not harm fashion eyewear manufacturers
[ad_1]
Representatives of prestigious brands have not proved that counterfeit products are replacing their products
It seems that an entrepreneur from Stavropol will not have to bear responsibility for trading in fakes of famous brands. Two large companies, including those producing expensive fashion accessories, wanted to fine the businesswoman, but the Supreme Court indicated that they did not have sufficient grounds for this.
As it became known to MK, the woman was selling sunglasses with the logos of two world-famous fashion houses. Original glasses of these brands cost tens of thousands of rubles. Representatives of the companies did not like this, and they decided to bring the Stavropol woman to administrative responsibility, for which they turned to the Arbitration Court of the Stavropol Territory. They wanted to recover lost profits from the citizen, which they estimated at 125.5 thousand rubles.
When calculating the losses, they proceeded from the price of the original glasses, which was current at the time the counterfeit ones were seized. At the same time, they insisted that some fake glasses are crowding out some original ones from the market. The court acknowledged that this price is the lost income that the copyright holders could have received if their exclusive rights to the brand had not been violated, and supported the plaintiffs. The 16th Arbitration Court of Appeal and the Intellectual Property Rights Court upheld the decision of the first instance. The defendant was not satisfied with this, and she turned to a higher authority.
Having examined the case, the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that the decisions of lower instances were erroneous. In particular, because the courts did not examine the counterfeit goods in order to determine whether buyers could believe that the glasses were really made by well-known brands. At the same time, the offender produced obviously non-original goods of prestigious brands and sold them to a completely different class of consumers than those who buy genuine accessories. That is, the plaintiffs failed to prove that fashion companies really lost at least one of their customers. The Supreme Court ruled that all three court decisions should be overturned and the case remanded for retrial.
[ad_2]
Source link
