Initiatives to stem illicit trade in China’s e-commerce

This chapter focuses on aspects of intellectual property protection in China’s e-commerce market, providing insights on major policy and enforcement issues and explaining how Chinese regulators are addressing these problems. In the first part, the chapter describes the main features of the legislative and regulatory framework, just as Chinese legislators are working on a comprehensive reform of the e-commerce law. In the second part, a selection of policy documents is presented and the results of national enforcement campaigns described, with a special focus on key issues in the criminal prosecution of commercial scale intellectual property infringements. In the last part, the author looks at recent initiatives by the public and private sectors to work out long-term solutions through self-regulations and a non-contentious approach.