Speaking at the sixth annual International IP Conference organized in Paris, Alex von Schirmeister said the US-headquartered company has tried to create programmes to fight counterfeiting.
But, he said, eBay faces a big challenge, given that it has 276 million users with 113 million objects for sale at any one time. He added: “Now you have organized crime using eBay to sell products.”
Von Schirmeister also claimed that eBay has 2,000 out of its 14,000 staff devoted to “fighting counterfeiting and other illicit activities”.
“We have a responsibility to our consumers. It is not profitable to sell fakes,” he added.
Von Schirmeister said eBay has a four-pronged approach to combating the sale of counterfeits: education of buyers and sellers; measures to control the level of sales, including filter technologies; cooperation with large and small brand owners as well as enforcement agencies; and repression.
He said that so far there have been 500 seizures of illegal goods in France, and many thousands worldwide.
He also acknowledged that cooperation with brand owners could be improved. Some 18,000 brand owners have signed up to eBay’s VeRO programme and von Schirmeister said: “Some projects are underway to upgrade it. It is just one tool among many.”
“It’s not a perfect science,” he added. “eBay does not possess the products. There will always be a small number of counterfeits – we cannot eliminate it 100% without cooperation.”
His comments come less than two weeks after a French court ordered eBay to pay brand owner Hermes €20,000 in damages over the sale of counterfeit bags on its site.
In response to that decision, eBay said the ruling related to old cases, and its verification measures had since been improved.
Also speaking at the conference, Justin Hughes of the Cardozo Law School in New York, said that, when it comes to tackling online copyright infringement through peer-to-peer file sharing, “the future is filtering”.
He explained that recent cases in Europe and the US indicate that internet service providers such as YouTube may be expected to filter content for copyright violations, while pending legislation in the US may require universities to do so.
Hughes added that filtration could be achieved by legal or technical means, such as so-called traffic-shaping, which slows down some P2P packets to maximize the use of bandwidth.
The Sixth International IP Conference, “Litigation in the Intangibles Economy”, is taking place this week in Paris and features exclusive video presentations from European Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot and French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde.
Other speakers include representatives of Vivendi, EADS, Europol, Thomson and GE as well as judges from the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. The conference is initiated by the French Institute of Patent Attorneys, CNCPI, and organized by Premier Cercle.
