SAIC: “Free-riding” is one of the crackdown targets for Anti-Unfair Competition Law
On November 17, 2017 when taking a joint interview with Xinhuanet and gov.cn, the staff from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) said that, “free-riding” was actually a kind of unfair competition acts through counterfeiting of others’ influential and well-recognized commercial signs for the purpose of pursuing trading opportunities by causing confusion among consumers.
Those illicit methods not only cheat consumers and infringe upon their rights and interests, but also damage the goodwill of legal operators and disturb the proper order of market competition. The existence of such methods not only contradicts the modern market economy, but also is the target of regulation and crackdown stated in the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. If such counterfeiting spreads unchecked, then nobody is willing to innovate. If we enrich ourselves by counterfeiting others, then we will not achieve the goal of building an innovation-oriented country. Therefore, counterfeiting should be specified as the target of crackdown in the Anti-Unfair Competition Law.