Famous brands featuring in Baoshan cases

Trademark infringement cases involving high-end foreign fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton and Chanel and well-known cigarette and liquor names accounted for more than half of those handled by the Baoshan District People's Procuratorate over the past five years, according to a white paper issued on Tuesday.

The procuratorate said it had accepted 77 criminal cases related to intellectual property infringement with 212 people involved.

The number of such cases showed a wavelike rising trend year by year between 2015 and 2019, it said.

More than 60 percent of victims in 38 trademark infringement cases which were prosecuted were foreign brands. Luxury brands and domestic cigarette and liquor brands such as Chunghua filter cigarettes and Moutai were the main targets of copycats.

E-commerce platforms and social networking apps such as Taobao and WeChat were becoming the places where knockoffs, especially copies of luxury goods, were sold, the procuratorate said.

Counterfeiters and sellers of fake goods were often scattered in different areas, making transregional crime a common phenomenon.

In one case it cited, a man surnamed Liu was sentenced to three years in jail with a three-year reprieve and fined 150,000 yuan (US$21,174) last year after he sold 255 boxes of fake Moutai liquor to two local companies.

Liu, a local employee of a company under Kweichow Moutai Distillery Co, sold 205 boxes of fake Xi Jiu, a type of Moutai liquor, to a local industrial corporation for more than 220,000 yuan in 2015.

Between July 2017 and February 2018, Liu sold another 50 boxes to a trading company, which paid him over 70,000 yuan.