(July 14, 2008, Weil Gotshal News)
July 14, 2008 NEW YORK -- In a ruling from Judge Richard J. Sullivan today, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP earned for its client eBay a complete victory in a closely followed suit, in which Tiffany, the luxury goods company, claimed that eBay was responsible for policing counterfeit merchandise offered on its trading platform, one of the largest e-commerce sites of any type and by far the largest of its type in the on-line business.
The ruling, which rejected all of Tiffany's claims, is of importance both in clarifying the doctrine of secondary trademark liability as it applies to Internet intermediaries as well as in validating the significant business and technological measures implemented by eBay at great expense in its own effort to create a safe trading environment.
Of the Tiffany action, which was commenced over four years ago in the Southern District of New York,
Bruce Rich, the senior partner on the case and co-head of Weil Gotshal's
Intellectual Property/Media practice, said, "It is gratifying that the trial court so definitively rejected Tiffany's legal claims, along with many of the factual foundations upon which they were predicated. We are delighted to have played a role in supporting eBay's position, and in defending the underlying tenets of the company's business model." The ruling, which was especially notable in light of a recent judgment against eBay in France in a similar action brought by the French high-end goods company LVMH, completely vindicates eBay's position, which is that in its role as an e-commerce transaction intermediary, eBay is necessarily limited in its ability to validate the provenance or authenticity of merchandise offered on the site -- a task that the trademark law first and foremost assigns to trademark owners such as Tiffany.
In addition to Mr. Rich, other Weil Gotshal partners involved in the case were
Bruce Meyer and
Randi Singer, supported by associates
Mark Fiore,
Lori Schiffer,
Cecilia Silver,
Sabrina Perelman and
Caroline Geiger.