Time-honored brands targeted by fakers

More than 100 people have been charged in 55 cases involving infringing the intellectual property rights of time-honored Shanghai brands over the past three years, the Shanghai People's Procuratorate announced on Thursday.

Such cases are increasing every year, prosecutors said, with more counterfeit products being sold overseas or via social media.

Social media sales made the evidence hard to collect, they said, and there was a growing trend of organized famed brand infringement.

In a recent case in Hongkou District, a man surnamed Wang bought sugar packaging marked with local sugar brand Yutang and sugar from others from April 2017.

He employed two workers to put the sugar into the packages and sold them to retailers. Although the retailers knew that these bags were counterfeit, they still sold them, prosecutors said.

Wang and his two employees were sentenced to up to four years and three months in jail and fined. Two people who sold sugar to Wang and four who bought sugar from him received sentences from 18 months to three and a half years in addition to fines. 

Liu, who provided the counterfeit Yutang packaging, was sentenced to three years and three months in jail.

All were ordered to return their illicit gains.

The procuratorate's Hu Chunjian said it had handled or was handling several intellectual property disputes involving local time-honored brands such as bicycle maker Phoenix and cosmetics producer Maxam.

"In recent years, the consumption of homemade brands is witnessing a significant surge with some of them undergoing a transformation or beginning international cooperation, which made the criminals target these brands for counterfeiting," Hu said.

Prosecutors are working on a protection mechanism especially for these time-honored brands, including building a database and intelligent platforms to eliminate risks and gather companies' feedback.

A session with local CPPCC members on Thursday was told that since last year the city's procuratorates had enhanced their crackdowns on intellectual property infringement and had charged 460 people in 236 cases.