Alibaba's 2022 IP Protection Report

Alibaba has now released its 2022 Annual Report on Intellectual Property Protection.

The group reports protecting more than 730,000 IP rights under 640,000 rights holder accounts on the IP Protection Platform by the end of 2022. It is also claimed that 98% of IP takedown requests on the Alibaba sites were handled within 24 hours for the third year in a row.

In 2022, Alibaba developed an online intellectual property dispute mediation mechanism alongside Zhejiang (Hangzhou) Intellectual Property Litigation and Mediation Center, and expanded its work in relation to falsified documents used to appeal takedowns (such as fake authorisation letters and purchase invoices). 

The group also reports that its Original Designs Protection Platform has protected more than 800 million photos, 56 million short form videos, and 580,000 design manuscripts by the end of 2022 for the benefit of over 10,000 designers. This platform offers a "detection system to help authenticate designs and digital content", allowing Alibaba to detect infringing content and quickly remove it. 

The 2022 report also details work in relation to Geographical Indications (GIs) - these are signs used on products that have characteristics or qualities attributable to a specific geographic origin (such as Scotch whisky and Champagne). Alibaba reports that by the end of 2022, it had registered around 180 GIs for online protection and had taken action against 5000 product listings that infringed these GIs.

Offline efforts by Alibaba to tackle counterfeits in 2022 resulted in 2123 investigations with law enforcement and led to the arrest of 2737 criminal suspects. 

Alibaba reports prioritising work on cross-border, covert, and cross-platform counterfeiting - this echoes Amazon's recent announcement of its Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (working with other online retailers to gather information on bad actors operating across multiple platforms) and the work done by Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit in 2022 to tackle the counterfeiting problem offline.