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Last updated on: June 8, 2022
Owned by the Chinese ecommerce conglomerate Alibaba Group, Lazada is an ecommerce platform headquartered in Singapore while serving several Southeast Asian countries including the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Whether you sell products officially on Lazada or not, you need to keep an eye on the product listings popping up on the platform to ensure bad actors aren’t infringing on your copyright.
In this article, we discuss:
Copyright infringement on Lazada refers to fake sellers and scammers using copyrighted text, product photos, and other media from legit brands to make quick profits.
While in some cases, the sellers may be trying to sell counterfeit products, in other cases, sellers may not have any product with them at all. They might just be using copyrighted material of a brand to trick customers into making a purchase.
Lazada has a strict policy towards intellectual property infringement which is included but not limited to counterfeit product sales. But the platform does not automatically scan user-generated listings for infringement. Instead, it reviews infringement complaints and takes action accordingly.
Direct infringement means selling counterfeit copies of your products by using your brand’s official images in order to confuse customers into believing they are buying original products.
For instance, a scammer may set up a fake seller account and claim to sell Apple’s Macbook by copying the original product images from Apple’s website with the intention of tricking innocent customers. In reality, the scammer may end up sending a defective product, a counterfeit product, or no product at all.
Indirect infringement occurs when a seller unintentionally ends up infringing on your intellectual property. That means a seller may not be directly selling counterfeit products on Lazada under your brand’s name or product category, but they may have unknowingly used your copyrighted content.
For instance, a seller on Lazada may be selling black hoodies similar to the ones your brand offers, but they may not have good product pictures for them. To get more eyes rolling, they may end up using professional product pictures from your official website.
While lookalike products can have the same look and feel like an original existing product, the main difference between a lookalike and a counterfeit product is that there is no direct infringement.
But it is still considered copyright infringement and you can take legal action against them for using your copyrighted content without your permission.
Indirect infringements on marketplaces are harder to find. Bad actors can misspell the product name or the listing to evade from keyword research. Unlike Alibaba, users cannot conduct image search on Lazada, brands will probably need help from technology like image recognition to check if their product image has been stolen.
There are many ways that bad actors can scam unsuspecting customers and infringe on the copyrights of brands, including:
Selling illegal copies through branded product images: The easiest way for scammers to sell counterfeit products on Lazada is by making the product listing seem as authentic as possible. In many cases, scammers copy the original product images along with the original product descriptions from the brand’s website to make it seem like they are directly selling the product from the brand or as a redistributor of the brand.
Offering heavy discounts: To entice customers, most scammers follow the same old strategy – offering great discounts that just seem too good to be true. Scammers can offer discounts of up to 60-80% off just to get more orders and make more sales
Product reviews: Scammers also use fake reviews to make their product listings seem genuine. After all, if they are selling fake products and people have recently purchased from them, their review section would be filled with negative feedback. To suppress the negative reviews, they flood their page with fake positive reviews.
Sharing seller accounts: Many scammers also share seller accounts and offer a wide range of product catalogues in order to build their seller profile and make more customers trust them. It also means that even if a few of their product listings get taken down, they might still not lose their account access.
Since Lazada is a part of the Alibaba Group, it shares the same Intellectual Property Rights complaint procedure as the other platforms under Alibaba.
There are two ways to report Lazada copyright infringement – File a complaint through Alibaba Groups’ Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) Platform or fill up the one-time IP infringement online form provided by Lazada.
The biggest difference between the two is that you need to sign up on the IPP platform and create an account on it, which in turn allows you to file multiple infringement complaints through the same account without the need to upload the same information again and again.
On the other hand, the IP infringement form is a one-time thing and you need to fill-up the form for every new infringement complaint
You can register on the platform as an individual, company, or authorized personnel of the copyright holder with your email address and mobile number.
You will then be required to provide proof of identity along with proof of IPRs, which can include trademark, copyright, and patent to open the account.
Once your documentation is verified by the platform, you wouldn’t have to provide the same details again.
Now, you need to actively identify listings that are infringing on your copyright and possibly selling counterfeit products in order to report them.
To do this, go to ‘Submit Complaint’ option under the ‘Complaint Submission’ section.
Once you have submitted your complaint, you will have to wait for Lazada to review it and take action accordingly. You will be able to check the current status of all your complaints under the ‘Manage Complaints’’ option.
If you don’t want to sign up on the IPP platform, you can also fill up the IP infringement form present on Lazada.
When filing the form, you will be required to provide the following details:
Every time a bad actor infringes on your copyright, it directly affects your brand’s reputation and bottom line. Getting copyright infringement under control can definitely be challenging, considering you need to manually scourge through the Lazada platform to look for infringements and then report them.
Red Points makes this entire process easier by automatically tracking and enforcing copyright infringements on several marketplaces, websites, and domains, including Lazada.
See how you can eliminate copyright infringement with Red Points.