On February 10 the management company of the Silk Market, a counterfeiting hotspot in the centre of Beijing, issued an aggressive letter accusing lawyers acting for brand owners of improperly asking for money from stall holders. The lawyers involved deny the accusations.
The incident is the latest attempt by the management of the Silk Street market to obstruct a four-year campaign by a coalition of brand owners comprising Burberry, Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Prada to make the landlord of the Silk Street market liable for allowing fakes to be sold there.
The market management company, which has signed an anti-counterfeiting agreement with a coalition of brand owners, has temporarily closed shops that have been caught selling fakes three times since February 1.
But over the past three weeks, angry stallholders have begun a series of protests at the law firm IntellecPro, which is acting for the coalition.
“Over 40 of the stallholders crammed our reception area. We tried to lock office doors but some of them still rushed into our rooms and scratched our files and documents, banging on desk partitions with water bottles,” Zhao Tianying, a legal consultant at IntellecPro, told
Managing IP.
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