Internet celebrities live with fakes can be sentenced to up to ten years in prison

  □ Pan Ziqiang

  With the rapid development of the Internet, live streaming has become a popular way of shopping.

More and more merchants choose Internet celebrities or traffic stars to display products online, ask questions and answer questions, and guide sales in the live broadcast room.

Live delivery of goods not only brings benefits and convenience to consumers and business opportunities to businesses, but also exposes many problems, such as the Simba Bird's Nest incident and Guo Meimei's sale of toxic weight-loss drugs, etc., which require urgent attention and vigilance.

  Not long ago, a court in Jiangsu Province heard such a case: From October 2019 to January 2020, he managed a leased office space and warehouse and purchased a large number of counterfeit international brands SK-II, DIOR, Keyan, Shiseido, Lancome, Armani and other cosmetics with no packaging and no Chinese logos, and recruited web anchors, product customer service, warehouse administrators and other teams to open live broadcast rooms on Alibaba's 1688 live broadcast platform to sell the above-mentioned counterfeit registered trademark cosmetics.

As of the incident, the management team had accumulated sales of more than 380,000 yuan, unsold goods value of 420,000 yuan, and illegal gains of more than 110,000 yuan.

  After the trial, the court held that the registered trademarks involved were protected by law within the validity period. Guan Mou sold goods that he knew were counterfeit registered trademarks, and the amount of sales was huge, and his behavior had constituted the crime of selling goods with counterfeit registered trademarks.

Guan's use of Internet celebrity anchors to sell fakes not only harmed the interests of consumers, but also violated the rights and interests of the right holders of the goods involved and seriously disrupted the order of the social market.

According to Guan’s crime nature, circumstances and degree of social harm, he was sentenced to three years and three months’ imprisonment for the crime of selling counterfeit registered trademarks, and a fine of RMB 220,000; the illegal income recovered and the counterfeit detained in the case Goods with registered trademarks shall be confiscated.

  Article 214 of the Criminal Law of my country stipulates that the sale of goods that are known to be counterfeit registered trademarks and the amount of illegal gains is large or there are other serious circumstances shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years and a fine or a fine; the amount of illegal gains is huge Or if there are other particularly serious circumstances, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than ten years and shall be fined.

  In addition, Internet celebrities or celebrities use their own traffic advantages to falsely publicize products sold during the live broadcast process. There is obvious fraudulent consumer behavior, and they have to bear corresponding civil compensation liabilities.

According to Article 55 of the Consumer Rights Protection Law, if the goods sold in the live broadcast room are counterfeit or inferior, the same applies to the one-for-one-compensation rule. Buyers can follow the provisions of Article 24 of the Consumer Rights Protection Law. Regulations require return, replacement or repair; if the sold products are adulterated, adulterated, fake as genuine, shoddy or substandard products are pretended to be qualified products, the sales amount of more than 50,000 yuan constitutes the sale of counterfeit and shoddy products crime.

  The Internet economy is an economy of integrity, and network anchors should operate in good faith in accordance with the law, consciously abide by the "Code of Conduct for Online Live Marketing", must not conduct false propaganda or engage in other illegal activities, and earnestly fulfill their obligations of authenticity and legality; consumers should also enhance their knowledge Structure, learn laws and regulations, avoid blindly following consumption, improve one's own legal literacy, and focus on rights protection.

  (The author is an assistant judge of Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court, compiled by our reporter Pu Xiaolei)