Tuesday, July 15, 2008

eBay must block the sale of all GENUINE LVMH products

eBay has recently been ordered by a French court to stop the sale of all LVMH items. This includes both counterfeit and GENUINE products. Yes, you read it correctly, a French court is saying that eBay cannot have any listings for genuine LVMH products. The reasoning behind this is that LVMH is allowed to pick its own distributors and eBay is not a liscensed distributor of their products.

The court is telling eBay that it must pull all the listings of LVMH products or it will face a daily fine. The court is saying that any website that ebay owns, not just ebay.fr but also ebay.com must pull all the listings. This is a scary issue because if this is upheld and enforced, then all brands will be able to do the same thing. I am sure that Sony and Canon would like to curb the secondhand market for their products. The secondhand market definetly hurts their sales because people don't purchase new items but just buy used ones.

Obviously an issue of jurisdiction comes into play here. I would be curious if anyone knows how it is possible for a French court to enforce a judgement on ebay if they were to stop selling to France altogether? and did not maintain a physical presense there? I am not sure what eBay.fr sales are but it might be its best option. This way the French people might get upset because they are not able to use eBay and then they would push to change the law.

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