Is the Chinese (Corporate) Approach to IP Changing?

Earlier this year I noted that the Chinese marketplace was awash in knock-offs and outright copies of American products. That's not likely to change soon, but it may be leaning toward being less accepted.

I got a PR notice that the French fashion/design house Louis Vuitton is in the process of doing a deal with Taobao, one of the largest open marketplace sites in China, to handle the appearance of counterfeit items. I can't read the original, but commenters have compared Taobao to both Amazon (with its individual sellers' marketplaces) and eBay. It's a very large marketplace, where small dealers find customers, and people sell and re-sell individually.

Such a large distributed environment makes IP policing a potential mess. Few entities have the resources to enforce trademarks and copyrights against tens of thousands of individuals, and unless you're as batshit crazy as the Cartel you don't want to engage in mass lawsuits. What Louis Vuitton seem to be heading toward looks more sane, though with caveats: a notice-and-takedown procedure. L.V. will no doubt be responsible for searching and scanning the postings and delivering notices to Taobao to take down sales listings. Taobao will in turn have to be responsible for telling users what has happened and may also be responsible for policing users (accounts) that get a bad reputation.

This is definitely a better approach than wholesale lawsuits but the devil of any such system is in the details. What right of appeal do individuals have? What safeguards are there against malicious use of the system - imagine rival sellers who abuse the notifications to hamper competitors. What sort of auditing will be conducted to ensure that Vuitton are taking proper care with sending notices? We've seen a multitude of abuses of such systems in the US and I imagine the same bad behaviors will be repeated here.

That said, the most interesting question to me is whether this sort of agreement represents a sea change in how the Chinese marketplace is regarded and treated. As I noted in the earlier post, there's a theory that marketplaces evolve. America has evolved from IP upstart to IP corporatist; China is widely regarded as having been an upstart but if the theory is right then at some point it, too, will begin to evolve. I guess we'll see.