Detecting Trademark Pirates
|
A California-based maker of color cosmetics had its trade name pirated; PIERS helped identify the culprit.
|
A family-owned, California-based maker of value-priced color cosmetics has steadily built a profitable export business through distributors in several Pacific Rim countries — proof that global commerce is not the exclusive province of large multinationals.
|
More recently, however, the cosmetics maker saw a less-than-welcome sign of its success abroad: its trade name had been pirated.
|
"They had the evidence: cosmetics they hadn't made but carrying their labels had turned up at outlets in Mexico," explains PIERS' Joel West. "And they had a theory: they believed a Chinese company was shipping the cosmetics to the States under a pseudonym, repackaging them in California with the counterfeit labels, then trucking them to Mexico for resale."
|
To escape detection by Customs inspectors, many counterfeiters do not affix the fraudulent labels until the merchandise is in the country where it is to be sold, according to the International Trademark Association. In this case, the counterfeiters waited until their merchandise had cleared Customs and arrived in the U.S., before adding the American label.
|
Working from a detail on the label — a Mexican tax ID number — West searched the PIERS Mexican cross-border trade database. "We were able to identify the Mexican company receiving the counterfeits as well as evidence of more than US$200,000 in fraudulent shipments through this particular connection."
|
The International Trade Commission estimates that American companies lose more than $60 billion a year because foreign companies fail to protect or infringe on intellectual property rights (IPR).
|
| Learn more about PIERS Products>
|
| <Return to the application index
|
