Alibaba's brand protection efforts receive a boost as Cloud Sword Alliance expands
Intellectual-property task force Cloud Sword Alliance on Tuesday announced in a meeting in Hangzhou that it would further collaborate between the Chinese government and businesses, strengthen enforcement, step up IP protection awareness, training for law enforcement and push for greater responsibility among society at large.
Alibaba continues to crack down on counterfeit goods
The taskforce, originally set up by Alibaba together with five provincial and municipality governments in China, was created in 2016 to help the ecommerce giant and the authorities to protect brands from IP infringers.
The meeting on Tuesday also saw Alibaba announcing the addition of eight more governments, in line with the taskforce’s plans to eventually include the entire country in the taskforce.
“This is the first public communiqué between governments and enterprises at such scale [in China],” said Jessie Zheng, Alibaba’s chief platform governance officer.
“We will continue our promise to increase our investment in brand protection and do our best to unite all parties. Alibaba is not alone in our brand-protection efforts.”
Added Chai Haitao, deputy director of the Office of the National Leading Group on the Fight Against IPR Infringement and Counterfeiting: “Our final objective is to include the entire country in this program.”
The taskforce last year cracked down on 417 counterfeit production racquets during a four-month investigation using technology like complex algorithms, machine learning, optical character recognition (OCR) and mapping.