L’Orèal Takes eBay To Court
By: Ainsley Brown
The French cosmetics giant, L’Orèal is suing eBay alleging that eBay is putting its customers at risk by failing to adequately address the sale of fake products on its website. The case opened in High Court this Monday in London.
According to L’Orèal its issues with eBay stem from the sale of counterfeit products, parallel imports, unboxed cosmetics and testers on the latter’s site. What is more, consumers could be in danger from untested poor quality knock-offs. However, this is much more than a customer health issue for L’Orèal. If any thing it is more about maintaining and defending the reputation of its brands from real and substantial danger in the market place.
For its part eBay has chosen to counter with the defense that it is merely a trading platform and is in no way directly involved in the sale of the goods. L’Orèal of course wholly rejects this argument.
It will be very interesting to see which arguments wins out in the in, L’Orèal’s or eBay’s. While I will admit that I do not have the full particulars of the case, I just have feeling that L’Orèal is going to win this one. But eh you never know it lost a similar case against eBay in Belgium. There is just no such thing as: a sure thing in litigation.
L’Orèal has launched similar cases against eBay in France, Germany and is gearing up for a fight in Spain as well.
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