Finally found a
good article on parallel importing and the grey market.
Wikipedia is full of crap. Here's the deal. Compaines don’t want anyone to be able to buy products in one region, where they’re cheaper, and sell them in another region, where they’re more expensive. So, they say importers who do this violate trademark laws.
…‘Huh?' you say. ‘What does selling legitimately purchased, imported goods have in common with, say, illegally selling a book titled Harry Potter (TM): The Lost Adventures'? The answer is nothing, of course. The companies aren't worried about their IP - they're worried about their ability to fix prices. But, they wouldn't get very far in court arguing that they have a right to gouge consumers and block free trade... so they argue they have a right to protect their trademarks from being diluted, instead.
…I know your next question. How could imported goods possibly dilute the quality of companies’ trademarks? Well, let's say, for example, someone imports a Japanese PSP, and he can't read Japanese. Because he can't read Japanese, this person has no idea the instruction booklet warns people never to play with the PSP in the bathtub. So, he plays with it in the bathtub, and gets electrocuted. A man has died from a product with Sony branding, and it's the fault of those no good importers.
Some countries buy into this line of reasoning, and some don't. The United States doesn't. Japan and Hong Kong don't. Europe does. A product made for sale outside the European Economic Area (EEA) can't be sold inside the EEA without the trademark holder's permission.
Lik-Sang, of course, did not have Sony's permission to sell PSPs within the EEA. So Sony could claim lik-sang was infringing on their trademarks, and damaging Sony.
...That was Sony’s big weapon in it's fight against lik-sang, but it wasn't their only one. They also brought up unfair competition laws, false advertising laws, and even electrical certification laws, just to make doubly sure that the psp sales would be stopped. Also, to make sure lik-sang was as overwhelmed as possible, they even sued for a manual lik-sang had copied onto their website, even though lik-sang had already taken it down at Sony's request.
Lik-sang had only thing they could use in response: the fact that they were based in Hong Kong, where the European laws Sony was throwing at them didn't apply. But lik-sang was out of luck. The judge thought that, because they had a website that was set-up to sell products within the EEA, European laws should apply.
The rest is history.
Topic: Sony Puts Lik-Sang Out of Business (Read 25584 times)
