EBay, the online auction website, was ordered yesterday to pay €40 million (£31.5 million) in damages to LVMH, the French luxury goods group, for selling fake handbags, perfumes and haute couture.
The Paris Commercial Court said that eBay had committed “serious faults” through its failure to keep counterfeit goods off its site.The judges ruled that eBay had damaged the reputations of Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior Couture by selling counterfeit products.
LVMH in giving evidence said 90 per cent of 300,000 products labelled Dior and 150,000 handbags purporting to be Louis Vuitton sold on eBay in the second quarter of 2006 had been fake.
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