Argentine football superstar Lionel Messi and his brand management company recently filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York Federal Court in the United States, naming multiple Chinese cross-border sellers who sell counterfeit goods on e-commerce platforms such as Temu as defendants. This case marks a new stage of precise strikes by sports stars against infringement on cross-border e-commerce platforms.

The details of the lawsuit charges show that these involved cross-border sellers are mainly from within China, relying on major cross-border platforms to build a complete counterfeit goods sales chain: using false identity information to register platform stores; promoting counterfeit Messi jerseys, shoes, backpacks, accessories and other goods to American consumers through SEO optimization, with prices far lower than the genuine ones, but the materials and craftsmanship are extremely rough; shipping in small international postal parcels to avoid US customs spot checks by using the low-value goods exemption policy; after receiving platform infringement warnings, quickly canceling old stores, changing domains and servers to reopen stores; transferring revenue through multiple third-party payment gateways and offshore accounts to hide the real flow of funds, forming an organized and large-scale cross-border counterfeit sales network.

The litigation strategy is worthy of attention. Messi's side did not list e-commerce platforms such as Temu as co-defendants, but chose to precisely strike at the source of counterfeiting. Senior lawyer Schwartz of Messi's law firm said: "We chose to directly sue the infringing sellers to precisely strike at the core infringers, while avoiding unnecessary disputes with the platforms. Subsequently, we will ask the platforms to fully cooperate in removing infringing goods and banning violative stores, blocking the circulation of counterfeit goods from the channel end."

The litigation requests include: asking the court to determine that these cross-border sellers constitute trademark infringement, false origin marking and unfair competition; recovering all illegal gains, and applying for triple punitive damages, or claiming statutory damages according to the standard of 1 million to 2 million US dollars for each counterfeit item; requesting the court to issue a permanent injunction to prohibit continued infringement, and ordering the destruction of all inventory counterfeit goods; requiring the involved cross-border platforms to immediately remove all infringing goods and ban the involved stores.

Background information shows that Messi had completed the US "MESSI" trademark registration as early as 2016, with the trademark covering dozens of categories such as sportswear, footwear, luggage, sports accessories, and surrounding cultural and creative products, and has been globally commercialized through the official store The Messi Store and cooperative brands such as Adidas and Pepsi.

Industry insiders point out that this case sounds the alarm for the cross-border e-commerce industry, marking that the "barbaric growth" model of making profits by leveraging well-known IPs and selling fakes has come to an end, and sellers must complete the full-link compliance transformation from trademark search before goods are listed to supply chain authorization review. (Chuhaiwang, Sina Finance, NetEase)