The Supreme Court Lets The Ruling In Favor Of eBay For Selling Fake Tiffany Goods Stand

Posted on December 1, 2010

Last weekend we told you about the US government seizing over 70 domain names on which sites were allegedly  selling fake or counterfeit goods.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now refused to hear an appeal filed by Tiffany over a 2008 court decision that found in favor of eBay in a trademark infringement lawsuit over the sale of fake Tiffany goods.

By refusing to hear the appeal the Supreme Court is allowing a 2008 Federal court decision in to stand.

In the 2008 ruling, the federal court found that trademark law could not be used to hold eBay responsible for policing counterfeit Tiffany items on its site and it was the responsibility of the trademark holder to monitor instances of trademark infringement.

eBay points out that they are not actually selling the fake goods, but sellers are doing so on their system and although they are patrolling their system as well as they can, there is still fake merchandise being sold which they are not responsible for

So while the case with eBay do not have identical facts or as the seized domains, this case does seem to have at least a hint of what the sites on the seized domains were allegedly doing doing; the sale of fake goods and/or allowing copyrighted material to be exchanged over its servers or through its system even without hitting their servers.

Certainly an interesting ruling with an interesting timing.

6 thoughts on “The Supreme Court Lets The Ruling In Favor Of eBay For Selling Fake Tiffany Goods Stand”

  2. Domainers

    So by that reasoning, the small guy s in danger of losing his domain if he has anything on his site which is not officially licensed but the big boys can do it all they want because they have too much to sell.

    Of course the big boys sell 10000X more product than the small guy so how many fake good have sold through ebay (fine and dandy) compared to those 70 seized sites ?

  3. I see your point, but I guess the big difference is that eBay also hosts the sales for lots of legit stuff too, therefore implying some goodwill. CounterfitJeans.com, even if just a marketplace for others to sell jeans does not imply the same goodwill. Goes to show the counterfitting thing isn’t 0 tolerance.

  4. Ebay is a gigantic marketplace that acts as a facilitator. NFLJerzeyz888.com or PradaBagzDirectTaiwan.com, selling counterfeited goods, are nothing more than dedicated fraud operations.

    It’s the difference between a crack house and someone being found at Yankee Stadium with drugs in their pocket. Ideological apples and oranges.

  6. Ebay spends twenty million a year trying to police fraud on its systems. It is unreasonable to expect them to be perfect. Any comparisons between ebay and Domainers or ebay and fraudsters is ridiculous

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