Meta Launches Collaborative Legal Motion with Louboutin Targeting Counterfeit Sellers in its Apps

That is interesting.

As a part of its ongoing IP enforcement efforts, Meta has teamed up with luxury fashion brand Christian Louboutin to file a joint lawsuit against a person who had been running a counterfeiting operation from Mexico, and selling replica Louboutin products via Facebook and Instagram.

As explained by Meta:

“The suit, filed in america District Court for the Northern District of California, claims the defendant violated Meta’s Terms of Service and Instagram’s Terms of Use and infringed Christian Louboutin’s mental property rights through the use of Facebook and Instagram accounts to advertise the sale of counterfeit goods. Our policies and Terms prohibit IP infringement, including the sale or promotion of counterfeit products. Consistent with this, we’ve got taken multiple enforcement actions against the defendant’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts.”

As noted, Meta has been upping its IP enforcement of late, by implementing recent ways for brands to guard their properties through expanded detection and removal measures in its apps.

Last 12 months, Meta enhanced its Brand Rights Protection Manager tool with a brand new capability for brands to enact faster takedowns of content that Meta’s system had detected as potential replicas.

Through this process, brands are capable of upload images of their licensed products, which Meta’s systems can then use as a reference point for detecting similar matches, with a view to highlight potential usage violations in Page posts, Marketplace listings, etc.

That adds significant enforcement capability, while it also added an Mental Property Reporting API, which enables rights holders to more efficiently detect and report content that they imagine violates their IP rights.

And now, Meta’s moving to the subsequent stage, via collaborative legal enforcement of IP violations.

“This lawsuit is a transparent signal to those that would seek to interact in similar abuses that this behavior is not going to be tolerated. Meta and Christian Louboutin plan to proceed their enforcement efforts against counterfeiting and hold those that abuse our policies accountable.”

Direct legal motion could act as a big deterrent, especially alongside its enhanced image-matching IP measures. Since the only way for counterfeiters to get attention is to showcase their products as viable copies, but any image can now be detected, and Meta may move to come back after you via the courts, versus simply banning your account.

As such, it’s a big announcement for the corporate on this front, which could have a robust effect.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Meta moves to enact further, similar cooperative legal cases in future.