Jack Ma, Executive Chairman and founder of Alibaba, has called on Chinese legislators to treat counterfeiters and counterfeiting with the same imperative as they did in successfully cracking down on drunk driving.
In a post he wrote, “Nothing short of a concerted and unified effort by lawmakers, the judiciary and the public at large would stamp out the problem. Like five years ago, if the drunk driving debates and controversies had never happened, society would not have agreed on the proper legal penalties.
Ma’s post comes a week after Alibaba, a global on-line, e-commerce and marketplace provider, called for tougher laws, stricter enforcement, and stiffer penalties to crack down on purveyors of counterfeit goods in China.
Alibaba said China’s “ambiguous counterfeiting laws” were hampering authorities’ ability to build legal cases against counterfeiters, resulting in a low conviction rate that is “the fundamental reason for the inefficiency in combating counterfeiting and protecting intellectual property.”
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Alibaba has long faced criticism over the sale of counterfeits by independent vendors in its giant e-commerce marketplaces, which host some 1.5 billion product listings.
To maintain the trust of consumers and legitimate merchants selling on its platforms, the company has been waging an escalating war to control the problem, employing a range of tactics to combat fakes and put counterfeiters out of business. Alibaba screens and monitors product listings using manpower and advanced search, image recognition, and big-data technology.
Alibaba uses big data and identified 4,495 leads for offline investigations, which resulted in the successful criminal prosecution of 469 cases — just over 10%. It says sentencings occurred in 33 cases and found 80% of them were for probation.
It also studied 200 counterfeit cases penalized by the Bureau of Commerce and Industry last year, and the average fine was RMB10,000 (about A$2000). This reality only encourages more people to produce and sell fake goods.
Ma continued the push for stiffer laws, enforcement, and penalties, saying existing ones are inadequate. “There is a lot of bark around stopping counterfeits, but no bite. Longer sentences and bigger fines would discourage recidivism. The lack of deterrents is stunting China’s innovation, hurting its reputation and threatening the country’s future.”
Ma is also chairman of the China Entrepreneurs Club and the influential group has added its weight calling for the government to increase the legal cost of counterfeiting and further develop laws, noting the battle will be a lengthy one and require both authorities and businesses to remain resolute.
