Diesel targets China in copy clampdown

Italian lifestyle brand Diesel says it is initiating legal action against an average of three Chinese companies every week in its war against copycats selling copies of its apparel.

“Hundreds of legal actions are in place against usurpatory brands, especially in China,” the company said in a statement outlining the enormous scale of the counterfeit goods trade and its astonishing campaign to fight back.

Last year, Diesel says it started a legal action by the US Federal Court in New York, against 83 sites, which were illegally selling counterfeited products by using the cybersquatting technique – registering domain names with “Diesel” in the address.
So far Diesel closed 3346 sites, sent 4000 ‘cease and desist’ letters, and de-listed 19,000 sites from Google. Just 131 of those sites were in Asian countries.

“It has been calculated that in this way the company has avoided about 700,000 visits to illegal marketplaces; 9200 bids [from prospective buyers] have been removed completely,” the company said.

In Asia, over the past year Diesel obtained to remove 6786 listings on marketplaces, for a total of 1.7 million items.

Diesel has worked with Customs agencies to seize more than 60,000 items coming from China in 2013, and another 75,000 last year, and more than 80,000 items in the European Community.

In China, 1300 items have just been confiscated in a factory producing counterfeited t-shirts, and in another factory the police seized 910 pairs of shoes with Diesel logo, along with a quantity of unfinished products worth US$155,000.

Last month, Diesel successfully closed the case of the ‘Diesel Cluthing’ line, which was signalled by Diesel business partners who found infringing products circulating in the Colombian market. After thorough investigation, the Chinese authorities confiscated 520 jeans infringing the Diesel trademark: the company, who registered this logo, is now under an opposition process.

On top of these activities, Diesel says it has established a system to register its iconic products and therefore ensure that any potential copy is identified and sequestrated (in the last six months only, four cases have been closed successfully). The latest triumph took place earlier this year, when Diesel finally won back the property of its brand in Indonesia – a legal battle which has lasted 23 years.