The Supreme Court upheld AliExpress in a dispute with the owner of the rights to «Zhduna»

The Supreme Court of Russia has agreed with three lower courts that refused to collect 5.2 million rubles from the companies that control the Russian segment of the largest Chinese Internet retailer AliExpress. As follows from the court ruling published on Wednesday, Judge Ramziya Khatypova of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation rejected the cassation appeal of the plaintiff, who asked to transfer the case for review to the Judicial Board for Economic Disputes.A company from the United States lost a lawsuit in Russia over Little Raccoon CD Land in 2021, discovered a Zhdun soft toy on the website aliexpress.ru. The defendants — LLC «Alibaba.Com (Ru)», the Russian representative office of Alibaba Group, and its founder Singapore-based Aliexpress Russia Holding — were sent claims demanding to stop the sale and pay compensation. According to CD Land Group Marketing Director Irina Melekhova, «the absence of any response» — neither in the form of a response to the claim, nor in the form of stopping the sale of counterfeit products — prompted the copyright holder to go to court. In August 2021, the Moscow Arbitration Court recognized Alibaba .Kom (Ru)» is an improper defendant, since she is not the owner of the AliExpress marketplace, but only owns a Tmall store on it, which Zhdunov did not sell. The disputed items were posted on the pages of four other stores.The designer, who demanded a quadrillion rubles from IKEA, withdrew the lawsuitAs the court found, the owner of the marketplace is the second defendant — Singapore's Aliexpress Russia Holding, a joint venture between the Chinese group Alibaba and Russian companies. But at the same time, its functions are limited to providing a technical opportunity for sellers to offer goods for sale. The court came to the conclusion that the Singaporean company does not have the ability to independently track the violation of rights, since more than 139.2 million unique commodity units are placed on the marketplace, more than 225 thousand sellers from China and other countries place ads, including 45 thousand from Russia . The court also took into account that, having received specific references to counterfeit goods from CD Land, the defendant blocked access to them. The appeal was then upheld by the Court of Appeal and the Intellectual Property Rights Court. Alibaba Group, China's largest Internet company, has been operating in the field of e-commerce since 1999. The group also owns several subsidiaries and Internet sites: Alibaba Pictures, Alibaba.com, AliExpress.com, Taobao.com, Tmall.com. Alibaba Group, Megafon, Mail.ru Group and the Russian Direct Investment Fund created a joint venture in Russia and the CIS — «AliExpress Russia» in October 2019. .jpg» />Petersburg woman fined for hanging toys with anti-war slogans