By Nick Antonovics
PARIS (Reuters) - A French industry group plans to file a complaint with prosecutors seeking damages from eBay Inc. and other Internet auction sites for the sale of counterfeit products on their Web pages, the group's chairman said.
Marc Antoine Jamet, chairman of France's Union of Manufacturers (Unifab), told Reuters that the complaint, due to be filed next month, also aims at forcing the sites to clamp down on product pirates.
"There is a continent which makes the fakes, which is China, and there is a continent where they are sold, and that is the Internet," he said.
Other auction sites in the firing line include those run by privately held iOffer.com, Yahoo Inc. and Japan's Rakuten Inc..
But the main focus is eBay, with which Unifab has held more than a dozen meetings in the last two years, Jamet said.
"We think eBay is perfectly capable of policing its site, but they offer to take action only after the fact. They refuse to act pre-emptively," he said.
"We think they have the IT to manage their sites, to track bank accounts and ownership."
EBay spokesman Hani Duzry said the company operates an anti-counterfeit goods program and constantly monitors auctions for blatantly infringing products and removes them.
FOCUS ON EBAY
"We don't allow counterfeit items on the site. It is against eBay policy. It is illegal. We are committed to working with copyright owners on this," Duzry said.
Ebay "makes it easy", he said, for any copyright owner to contact eBay to report infringing products in order to have eBay remove them.
Jamet said, however, that the firm had refused Unifab's request to pro-actively shut down merchants of counterfeit goods in the same way it agreed in 2001 to ban listings of Nazi memorabilia and from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Unifab's complaint will contain concrete examples of counterfeit goods found for sale on the Internet, he said.
Leather goods maker Louis Vuitton, a unit of LVMH, the world's largest luxury goods group, last year found 235,000 examples of counterfeit articles on 340 eBay pages.
In one case, it tracked more than 100 copies of the same article being sold within one hour, said Jamet, who is also a senior executive at LVMH.
Other luxury goods companies are also targets of counterfeiters, while Unifab members in sectors from pharmaceuticals to spare car parts support the action, he said.
Unifab had decided to move now, he added, because the problem of counterfeit sales had exploded.
Three years ago, none of the French firms affected -- including big-name luxury goods makers such as LVMH, Hermes International and Chanel -- monitored Internet traffic.
Now, many have teams who have spent months gathering evidence and assembling a case.
"It's a huge phenomenon, which has multiplied by 25 times in the last five years," he said.
SEEKING FINES, DAMAGES
Jamet said Unifab would be asking prosecutors to seek damages and interest from the auction sites in relation to the alleged losses suffered by the firms. In the case of some luxury goods companies, these ran into millions of euros, he said.
Unifab also wants to prosecute the sites for providing the means to resell counterfeit goods, a charge the French luxury goods industry has successfully brought against shop owners in Beijing's silk market and on New York's Canal Street.
In addition, it is asking the French government to revise its laws on electronic commerce to make online auctioneers "co-responsible" for the goods that are sold on their sites, Jamet said.
Unifab believes its case has been strengthened by a Paris court's decision in June to fine online search engine Google 300,000 euros ($385,000) over advertisements for counterfeit goods generated by its sites. Google had based its defense partly on the existing French e-commerce law.
France is home to much of the world's luxury goods industry and the French government has taken steps in the past three years to toughen its laws against counterfeiting
The government tried last month to broker a friendly solution to the row between Unifab and the auctioneers, but it was rejected by the industry group which believed it did not go far enough.
Unifab estimates counterfeiting represents 5 to 9 percent of global trade, or 200 billion to 300 billion euros a year in lost earnings for manufacturers. Losses in France alone exceed 6 billion euros, it says.
($1=.7791 Euro)
(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco)