Facing Counterfeiting Crackdown, Beijing Vendors Fight Back

By SHARON LaFRANIERE
NYT

BEIJING — Any tourist who has stepped foot in this city’s famous Silk Street Market can testify that it is home to some of the wiliest, most tenacious vendors who ever tried to palm off a fake handbag on a naïve foreigner.

So when the market managers temporarily shut down 29 stalls over the past month for selling counterfeit goods, no one expected the merchants to acquiesce quietly to the loss of business.

“We expected trouble,” said Zhao Tianying, a legal consultant with IntellecPro, a Beijing firm specializing in intellectual property rights, who represents five foreign luxury-brand manufacturers that have sued the market for trademark violations. “But we never imagined this.”

The vendors have responded with the same ferocity with which they nail down a sale. Dozens of them have staged weekly protests against IntellecPro lawyers who are pursuing the trademark case, mocking them as bourgeois puppets of foreigners. The vendors confronted witnesses who provided evidence of trademark violations and filed a countersuit asserting that only the government can shutter a business.

(More here.)