Recently, the General Affairs Office of the State Council issued the Opinion on Tackling Infringements and Counterfeit Activities over network (hereinafter the Opinion) which made overall deployments to advance the healthy development of e-commerce in order to form open, honest, and safe environment for network transactions.
In China, the rapid development of e-commerce has become a strong driving force in economic growth, while at the same time the infringements and counterfeit activities in network are also on the rise. According to the Opinion, China will spend around 3 years efficiently keeping down the infringement and counterfeit activities over the internet through a long-term mechanism. In order to achieve this goal, it is demanded that the basic principles of regulation by law, technical support, coordination, regional cooperation and social governance should be upheld to give full play to the overall coordination mechanism for campaign against infringements and counterfeit activities.
Accordingly, the following measures will be implemented:
1. Special actions will be launched to crack down the online and offline marketing of counterfeit products in fields including agricultural material products, food and drug, cosmetics, medical devices, electrical and electronic products. Relevant departments will also enhance the investigations and prosecutions of network infringements and counterfeit activities..
2. Enterprise liability system will be put into practice. E-commerce platform enterprises will be urged to enhance the examination regarding the qualification of network operators, to cooperate with the law enforcement departments in tracking down operator marketing counterfeit products, and to stop the act of improving credibility through sham transactions. At the same time, network service providers will be urged to take the Notification-Delete obligation into practice, and to push for posting and delivery real-name system..
3. China will further improve the interdepartmental collaboration mechanism in enforcement, case consultation and joint conference system to enhance the cohesion of administrative enforcement and criminal justice. The inter-regional enforcement collaboration mechanism will be perfected by advancing the sharing of information and clues among Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region.
4. China will accelerate the making of laws and regulations in e-commerce to define the trading rules of network commodity, dispute solutions, and legal liability. China will research on supervision measures for preventing selling counterfeit products through WeChat and microblog.
