The bowl thieves are, for now, no more.
Chinese online shopping giant Alibaba has deleted copycat listings for an innovative strainer designed by a Canadian man. Ryann Aoukar was shocked to see his promotional material, and even his own image, purloined wholesale by unknown Chinese vendors. Now, Alibaba says money raised for a knockoff of the bowl by a Chinese crowdfunding campaign – more than $10,000 – will be returned to those who were falsely told they were supporting a project run by a local entrepreneur and his Italian designer.
"The listings brought to our attention were found to be infringing and have since been removed," an Alibaba spokesperson said.
The quick decision to pull the bowl-related copycat posts – one raising funds, another purporting to sell copied strainers – underscored the sensitivity of the knockoff issue for Alibaba, which last week also drew an unusually sharp sword against an arm of the Chinese government that accused it of being a haven for fakes. Executive Vice-Chairman Joe Tsai lashed out at the State Administration of Industry and Commerce for publishing what he called a "flawed" report based on "arbitrary methodology" that suggested a high percentage of goods for sale on Alibaba-run websites were illegitimate. Mr. Tsai said Alibaba is adding 300 people to an internal group tasked with rooting out knockoffs.
The tiff has highlighted broader issues in China, where Alibaba appears to be caught in a high-stakes political game tied to President Xi Jinping's wide-ranging bid to unquestionably stamp his authority on the country.
But for Mr. Aoukar, the episode revealed a lesson large corporations learned long ago: In China, the best defence is typically a good offence. Without it, anyone – even a designer who works at the University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design – can be vulnerable.
"I'm going to patent in China from now on," he said. "I did research now, and I found out if you patent in China, you can actually protect yourself quite well."
The prospect of fighting Chinese knockoffs is daunting to all but the most moneyed of foreign companies. Chinese factories can be nimble copiers, and operate in a language and market opaque to most outsiders.
But China, both in its ascension to the World Trade Organization and in subsequent years, has increasingly empowered copyright holders to fight infringers. It is setting up a specialized intellectual property court to adjudicate patent, trademark and other matters. Pressure from wealthier Chinese consumers has also led to the creation of large online shopping malls dedicated to selling legitimate goods. There are, in other words, both ways to fight piracy and ways to sell legitimate goods. But doing so requires entrepreneurs to think of China early in their process, perhaps filing the necessary patent paperwork overseas before even mounting the kind of Kickstarter-style crowdfunding campaign that, for Mr. Aoukar, led to his design being ripped off.
"It's not overly expensive – you can get lawyers that do it for a fraction of a cost it costs you to patent in places like Canada or the U.S.," said Mark Tanner, founder of Shanghai-based marketing and research agency China Skinny.
Using that patent to fight a copycatter can still be tough, of course. But without it, the process is far more difficult.
"If you don't have your patent or your trademark or copyright in China, it's very difficult to follow up with somebody," Mr. Aoukar said.
Nathan VanderKlippe