If you have ever visited Beijing’s famous Silk Street Market you can testify that it is the home of some of the most tenacious vendors that ever tried to pass off a fake handbag to an unsuspecting tourist. To say that the counterfeit trade is running rampant in Beijing would be a serious understatement. So when market officials temporarily closed down twenty-nine of the stalls on Silk Street for selling counterfeit goods, no one really expected the merchants would take it lightly.
IntellecPro, a Beijing firm that specializes in intellectual property rights, is representing five foreign luxury-brand manufacturers that are suing the market for trademark violations. They expected trouble from the vendors whose shops were closed, but they never imagined that it would escalate to a major protest that the vendors have staged against the IntellecPro lawyers who are pursuing the trademark case.
The vendors have confronted witnesses who provided evidence of trademark violations against them and have filed a countersuit asserting that only the government can shut down a business, not a corporation.
The vendors are taking the lawsuit very seriously, and a short message scrawled in pencil outside one of the shops tells the reason why, “We want to eat.” The skirmish between the crafty but mostly uneducated hawkers and five of the world’s best known producers of designer goods is part of a much bigger fight over China’s vast counterfeit industry. American movie, music, and software companies alone estimate that the Chinese counterfeit goods cost them more than $2 billion a year in sales revenues.
Truth is, any successful product is likely to be illegally copied in China. Despite warnings from the American embassy and China’s government’s pledge to crack down on the problem, the counterfeit industry is thriving in places like Beijing’s Silk Market even though they are facing increasing pressure to show some progress toward stopping the illegal activity.
As part of a court mediated agreement, the market managers agreed to punish vendors who sell the counterfeit good by shutting down their shops for up to a week. The managers of the markets say that the manufacturers who filled the lawsuit have threatened to increase the pressure on the Chinese government if the sale of the counterfeit items is not curtailed within six months.
In response to the closing of the shops, several dozen vendors crowded the lobby of IntellecPro’s offices in Beijing and occupied the reception area for hours until police mediators were able to control the crowd.
