On 9 July 2026 the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) handed down a judgment of unusual interest on the assessment of damages for online sales of counterfeit luxury goods. In Fendi Italia Srl & Ors v Rolo Fashion Ltd & Anor [2026] EWHC 1703 (IPEC), four LVMH houses had already obtained judgment in default on liability. What remained was the harder question: what should the infringement cost those who committed it?
Establishing infringement and compensating it are two very different exercises. The first can be relatively straightforward where goods bear well-known marks without authorisation. The second is anything but. Does every counterfeit sold correspond to a lost genuine sale? Certainly not. But does it follow that the remaining sales caused no damage at all? That would be just as doubtful. What value should be placed on the unauthorised use of a mark where the buyer would never have bought the genuine article? And how is reputational harm to be measured when, unlike a lost sale, it leaves no immediately traceable mark in anyone’s accounts?
A further difficulty clouded the picture: what the defendants had disclosed did not allow the scale of their trading to be reconstructed with any precision.
The case is, in short, a small laboratory of damages for counterfeiting.
It also repays attention from a European angle. Regulation 3 of the Intellectual Property (Enforcement, etc.) Regulations 2006, applied by the judge, was made to implement Article 13 of Directive 2004/48/EC on the enforcement of intellectual property rights — a provision that offers several routes to quantification precisely where the ordinary accounting of losses runs out.
A digital trade in counterfeit luxury goods
The claimants were Fendi Italia Srl, Loewe S.A., Christian Dior Couture S.A. and Celine S.A., proprietors of well-known luxury brands, together with their parent company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE.
The defendants were Rolo Fashion Limited and Georgia Aldridge, who had traded on her own account since August 2018, before the company was incorporated.
The goods bore the claimants’ marks. According to the claimants’ witness, at least some fell into the category of higher-quality counterfeits known in online communities as “superfakes” or “dupes”, the counterfeiting industry using terms such as “1 to 1” or “mirror quality” in its own communications. The vocabulary changes; the idea does not — counterfeits of a quality high enough to come close, sometimes uncomfortably close, to the genuine article.
The trade had found fertile ground online. The judgment records transactions with AliExpress and DHgate, dealings with a supplier identified as Xu Qiu or Xu Qiu Ping, a WhatsApp group and two Instagram accounts. The defendants maintained that they operated exclusively by dropshipping, yet some WhatsApp messages referred to goods being “in stock”.
None of this went to proving an infringement that had already been established. It had to serve a far more delicate purpose: measuring the scale of that infringement in order to price it.
A picture obscured by incomplete disclosure
The claim form was issued on 15 August 2024. An ex parte freezing injunction was granted on 3 September and continued until trial or further order, by consent, on 16 September 2024. That order also required the defendants to produce statements for several accounts covering January to August 2024. Those statements revealed, among other things, 55 payments from Ms Aldridge’s PayPal account to “Xu Qiu Ping”.
Judgment in default was entered on 17 January 2025. The defendants were also ordered to disclose their suppliers, the quantities and purchase prices of the infringing goods, their customers, and the number of products sold together with the prices charged.
Two features of the procedure are worth noting, because they shape what follows. At the parties’ request the inquiry was decided on the papers, on written submissions alone. And the defendants maintained that Ms Aldridge had no funds of any significance, the sums in her frozen accounts being effectively nil, so that a judgment debt of any size would be impossible to pay. The thinness of the argument put before the court did not go without consequence.
Disclosure remained incomplete. A transcript of a WhatsApp group covering April 2023 to October 2024 was produced, but stripped of the images the messages referred to. The claimants also complained of what was missing in relation to DHgate, AliExpress, certain suppliers and the Instagram accounts used to market the goods.
The judge therefore had to measure the loss from a necessarily partial picture of the trading. Far from being a procedural side-issue, that evidential imperfection runs through the whole judgment and largely explains the method adopted.
Three heads of damage, several methods?
The claimants advanced three heads: damage to the reputation of the brands, profits lost on genuine sales said to have been diverted by the counterfeits, and lost licensing income — the second and third being alternatives.
At first sight the arithmetic looks almost childish. Establish how many counterfeits were sold, identify what proportion of those sales displaced a genuine purchase, and multiply by the average profit on such a sale. Every one of those figures, however, resisted certainty.
How many products had actually been sold? What proportion of the buyers would have bought a genuine item had the counterfeit not existed? What profit would the houses in fact have made? And what of all the other sales, those that displaced no transaction on the legitimate market? The difficulty lies precisely in the gap between the certainty of the infringement and the uncertainty of its economic consequences.
“Superfakes”: quality does not make a lost sale
One of the most striking aspects of the judgment concerns “superfakes”. Their quality can be such that it blurs the line between genuine and fake. Did it follow that their buyers might have thought they were buying genuine goods, so that every transaction disclosed, at least potentially, a lost sale?
LVMH argued that such products were liable to deceive consumers and so to divert sales from the genuine market. HHJ Hacon was not convinced. He pointed in particular to the gulf between the prices. On average the counterfeits sold at a little under 15% of the price charged for the corresponding genuine product, and in one instance at less than 5% of the third claimant’s price. Such a difference made it unlikely, in his view, that a buyer believed he was acquiring a genuine Fendi, Loewe, Dior or Celine item. On the contrary, the exchanges in evidence suggested purchasers who knew perfectly well that they were buying a good imitation at a fraction of the price.
The reasoning should not be given a reach it does not have. The judgment does not declare “superfakes” economically harmless. It shows something else: the quality of a counterfeit is not, by itself, enough to establish substitution. Two markets can intersect without overlapping. Some buyers of counterfeits would never have paid the price of the genuine article, and their purchase represents no lost sale at all. Others may well belong to the brand’s potential clientele and have chosen the fake over the real thing. The whole question is how many.
Reduced to essentials, the “superfakes” problem turns less on physical resemblance than on proof of economic effect. A counterfeit may be perfect without the proof of lost profit being so.
Where damages rest on lost sales, then, proving infringement and counting fakes is not enough. Substitutability between the two products has to be established so far as possible. Price differentials, consumer behaviour, the circumstances of sale, how the goods were perceived, the characteristics of the customer base — each becomes material capable of giving the assessment a solid foundation.
How many sales were actually lost?
Before any substitution rate could be applied, the number of sales had to be established. The claimants had identified 1,311 members in the WhatsApp group used to offer the goods and assumed that each had made at least one purchase. Spread over the seventeen months covered by the transcript, those 1,311 purchases came to 77.12 sales a month. Applied to the 72-month claim period — the six years preceding the claim, Ms Aldridge having begun trading in August 2018 — that average produced 5,552 transactions. A substitution rate then had to be applied: 10%, 20% or 30% were put forward. At an average profit of £285.63 per genuine product, the lost profit would have come to roughly £158,525, £317,049 or £475,860.
The reasoning had an obvious weakness: membership of a WhatsApp group does not mean a purchase was made. The claimants can hardly be criticised for advancing the assumption most favourable to them, given that the gaps in disclosure left them little in the way of comprehensive data.
The defence proposed a different method, based on the sums credited to one of the defendants’ bank accounts. It was no more free of uncertainty.
HHJ Hacon accepted neither as it stood. He rejected the claimants’ construction: its central plank — the assumption that every group member had bought — was supported by nothing. He held, by contrast, that Ms Aldridge’s method had a sound basis, while noting its defect: it relied on a single account, over seven months, extrapolated to seventy-two. He made one correction, but a decisive one. To work out how many products the defendants had sold, Ms Aldridge had divided their receipts by the average price of the claimants’ genuine goods, £751.67. The relevant figure was plainly the defendants’ own average selling price, £110. The correction took the estimate from 10 to 66 sales a month, or 4,752 sales over the 72-month period. Arithmetic briefly regained the upper hand. What proportion of those 4,752 sales had actually displaced the purchase of a genuine product?
The judge settled on a substitution rate of 15%. He took the gaps in disclosure into account: the defendants were not to profit from uncertainty they had helped to create. He expressly rejected the argument that it was for the claimants to apply, if necessary repeatedly, for specific disclosure — the disclosure order was straightforward enough, and it was not at all clear that it had been complied with as it could and should have been. But that uncertainty could not stand in for evidence either, or justify a higher substitution rate of itself. Evidential failure may count against the party who should have supplied the evidence; it does not license conjecture in place of assessment. Fifteen per cent of 4,752 transactions came to around 713 lost sales. Taking a profit of about £280 per genuine product, the judge assessed the lost profit at £200,000.
The figures matter less, in the end, than the route to them. In a trading environment fragmented across messaging apps, social networks, platforms, suppliers and payment systems, the reality of the business often has to be reconstructed in pieces. Bank data, message exchanges, participant numbers, transaction frequency, prices charged: none of these delivers the accounting truth on its own, but taken together they can form a body of indications coherent enough for a court to get close to it.
The other 4,039 products: infringement without damage?
Calculating lost profit left another question open. Of the 4,752 sales the judge accepted, some 713 had cost the claimants a genuine sale. What of the other 4,039? It could hardly be said that they produced no legal or economic effect simply because their buyers would not have bought the genuine product. Each rested on the unauthorised exploitation of marks whose value lies precisely in their distinctiveness, their reputation and their power of attraction.
This is where the user principle comes in: measuring the damage by reference to the sum that would reasonably have been demanded for permission to use the right.
Whether that mechanism was available in a trade mark case was, however, a live question — and the answer is probably the most notable contribution of the judgment. In Reed Executive plc v Reed Business Information Ltd [2004] EWCA Civ 159, Jacob LJ had expressed serious reservations: he was “by no means convinced” that the user principle applies automatically in trade mark or passing-off cases, especially where the mark is not the sort available for hire. In the ordinary case the mark simply protects goodwill; awarding damages on that basis, he wrote, comes close to saying there is no damage so some will be invented. Birss J had defined the scope of that reservation in National Guild of Removers and Storers Ltd v Jones [2011] EWPCC 4: it addresses marks that are never made available to third parties for a fee. Luxury marks applied to bags and clothing fall fairly naturally into that description.
HHJ Hacon rejected the objection. He accepted first that damage from trade mark infringement does not take the same form as damage from patent infringement: a trade mark is a signal to the public, and the infringer causes harm by interfering with that signal or by exploiting or harming the reputation the mark enjoys. But he observed that in patent cases the willing-licensor and willing-licensee fiction is applied even where the patentee would never have granted a licence: it is a means of assessing compensation faute de mieux. There was no evident reason why the position should differ for trade marks — as 32Red plc v WHG (International) Ltd [2013] EWHC 815 (Ch) had accepted, by agreement of the parties. Such a claim, he concluded, is available in law. The sharpest formulation comes a little later: the alternative was that the defendants had the right to free use of the infringing signs, a result which, he noted, is not instinctively the more attractive one.
The exercise is of course a fiction where luxury marks on counterfeit goods are concerned. Fendi, Loewe, Dior and Celine would not have licensed Rolo Fashion to sell fakes bearing their marks. The point is not to reconstruct a contract that might really have been concluded, but to use that impossible licence as a yardstick for the value of the unlawful use. The fiction supplies the instrument for pricing a use the proprietor would never have authorised.
The judge noted that the particulars of claim alleged infringement under section 10(3) of the Trade Marks Act 1994, on the basis of unfair advantage taken of the distinctive character or repute of the marks. He was careful to recall that a judgment in default decides nothing on the merits; but, the defendants having chosen not to challenge any part of the claimants’ case, he considered that he had to assume that sales causing neither a lost sale nor reputational harm were nonetheless infringing acts under that provision, for which compensation was due. The damage was therefore not necessarily exhausted by the genuine sales whose loss could be proved. It remained to put a price on the use.
Once again the evidence was missing. There was nothing on which to base a royalty rate. The judge accordingly adopted what he himself described as a “bare minimum”: 3% of the defendants’ selling price (at [53]). The choice of that figure is not really explained. The judgment refers to no comparable licences, no sector average, no other economic data that would show why the minimum should be set at 3%. One can readily imagine that such material is particularly hard to produce where it concerns the commercial terms on which luxury houses license their marks, information likely to be confidential. The judgment does not reveal whether that difficulty played any part here.
Reputational harm: the invisible loss
Another head of damage is harder still to grasp: harm to reputation. The claimants relied on dilution and tarnishment said to flow from the circulation of counterfeit goods. That unauthorised goods can affect a luxury brand seems, intuitively, hard to dispute. But intuition does not create a compensable loss.
HHJ Hacon distinguished the infringement of the trade mark right, already established, from the reputational damage that might follow. On the facts, he held that the evidence did not sufficiently establish the effect of the sales on consumers’ perception of the marks. In particular, the material did not show that purchasers believed they were buying products sourced from a claimant (at [55]). The exchanges in evidence suggested rather that they knew they were buying imitations from an independent trader.
The judge did not rule out that a trade in counterfeit goods can damage a brand’s reputation or value. What he declined to do was to convert that possibility into a quantified loss without sufficient evidence. Some of the arguments were described as speculative, and no separate sum was awarded. Which raises another difficulty: how does one give evidential shape to a diffuse harm? The weakening of a mark’s distinctive character does not print its own figure on a bank statement. It may nonetheless affect how a sign is perceived, erode its exclusivity, or associate the mark with goods whose quality and distribution its proprietor does not control.
The task, then, is to turn the alleged harm into proof of loss. Depending on the circumstances, consumer surveys, brand-perception data, evidence of confusion as to origin or quality, or studies capable of objectifying dilution or tarnishment might all contribute.
The shadow of Directive 2004/48
The case might have remained an interesting domestic judgment handed down five and a half years after the end of the Brexit transition period. It offers, instead, an intriguing point of comparison with EU law.
The claimants relied on Regulation 3 of the Intellectual Property (Enforcement, etc.) Regulations 2006 — a provision made to implement Article 13 of Directive 2004/48/EC on the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The judge himself noted that lineage, and that no difference of significance between the two texts had been identified by either side.
The exact reach of that lineage today needs stating. The 2006 Regulations remain in force as assimilated law, but since 1 January 2024, with the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 taking effect, neither the principle of supremacy nor the general principles of EU law apply to them, and the courts of England and Wales are not bound by the case law of the Court of Justice. HHJ Hacon was therefore not applying the Directive: he was noting the origin of the provision he had to apply, and the absence of any relevant divergence argued before him. The kinship between the two texts survives the disappearance of the hierarchical link — which makes the comparison freer, not less instructive.
That European origin does not mean the compensatory logic is foreign to English law. Damages traditionally rest on the principle that the injured party should, so far as money can do it, be placed in the position it would have occupied had the wrong not been committed — a logic familiar enough to civil-law systems, and to the French principle of réparation intégrale. Regulation 3 sits within that logic in requiring damages to be appropriate to the actual prejudice suffered. The judgment notes that no issue arose on the general principles governing the assessment of damages in intellectual property cases, referring to Ultraframe (UK) Ltd v Eurocell Building Plastics Ltd [2006] EWHC 1344 (Pat), which draws them in turn from Gerber Garment Technology Inc v Lectra Systems Ltd.
The principle is simple. Its application is much less so, as Fendi v Rolo Fashion demonstrates. How is compensation to be secured when the number of infringing acts is itself uncertain, when only a fraction of the counterfeit sales can be treated as having diverted a genuine sale, and when other consequences — reputational ones in particular — resist monetary translation?
Article 13 of Directive 2004/48 offers several elements of an answer. Where the infringer knew, or had reasonable grounds to know, that he was engaged in infringing activity, the rightholder must be able to obtain damages appropriate to the prejudice actually suffered. Two methods are envisaged.
- The first takes into account all appropriate aspects of the case: the negative economic consequences suffered by the rightholder, including lost profits, the unfair profits made by the infringer and, where appropriate, elements other than economic factors, such as moral prejudice.
- The second allows damages to be set, in the alternative, as a lump sum on the basis of elements such as, at the least, the amount of royalties or fees which would have been due had the infringer requested authorisation to use the right.
Recital 26 of the Directive helps to make sense of the scheme. The aim is not to introduce punitive damages, but to allow compensation based on objective criteria. Above all, it expressly contemplates the case where the amount of the prejudice actually suffered is difficult to determine. The royalty that would normally have been due may then furnish one instrument for putting a value on it.
The same difficulty runs through the whole of Fendi v Rolo Fashion: certainty as to the infringement does not make the measure of its consequences certain.
Seen this way, the kinship between Regulation 3 and Article 13 is not merely a matter of legislative history. Both provisions come up against the same problem: the principle of compensation can be perfectly clear while the measure of the loss is not.
Fendi v Rolo Fashion against Article 13
The parallel is tempting. For the sales the judge treats as having replaced the purchase of a genuine product, the analysis turns on negative economic consequences: a sale was lost, and the profit that would have been made must be determined. For the remaining transactions the reasoning shifts ground. The loss is sought not in the sale that did not happen but in the economic value of the unauthorised use of the sign, with the user principle supplying the measure. A third head, reputational damage, is examined separately and rejected for want of evidence.
The judgment illustrates with unusual clarity that a single infringing business can produce several distinct consequences, and that these do not necessarily fit within a single method.
The comparison soon runs into a difficulty, however.
Article 13(1)(a), which requires all appropriate aspects to be taken into account, and Article 13(1)(b), on lump-sum compensation based notably on the hypothetical royalty, present the two methods as alternatives. It would be going too far to read Fendi v Rolo Fashion as a cumulative application of both limbs to the same loss.
The reasoning is more subtle. The judge does not value the same transactions twice. He divides the trading: 713 sales caused a loss on the genuine market; 4,039 did not. Neither the economic consequences nor the portions of the business being valued are the same.
In that light the European mirror becomes particularly interesting — not because the English judgment faithfully reproduces Article 13, but because it shows how a single infringing business can be broken down in order to identify and then value different economic consequences.
The hypothetical royalty: fallback or true measure of the loss?
Another question is worth asking. Is the hypothetical royalty merely a fallback, standing in for lost profit where lost profit cannot be proved? The case law of the Court of Justice suggests not. In Christian Liffers (C-99/15), decided in 2016, the Court held that setting damages as a lump sum on the basis of hypothetical royalties does not preclude compensation for moral prejudice where such prejudice is established. The royalty cannot therefore absorb, as a matter of principle, every manifestation of the loss: it is a method of assessing the loss, not a definition of its extent.
Stowarzyszenie “Oławska Telewizja Kablowa” (C-367/15) is more telling still. The Court accepted there that national legislation may allow a rightholder to claim, without proving the exact amount of the loss, a sum corresponding to twice the appropriate royalty that would have been due had authorisation been given (at [25]–[32]). The scope of that ruling needs to be measured precisely. The Court treats the Directive as a minimum standard: doubling the royalty is an option open to national law, not a requirement of Article 13. And it reserves, at [31], the exceptional case in which such a claim would so clearly and substantially exceed the loss actually suffered as to amount to an abuse of rights prohibited by Article 3(2).
The explanation is that the licence price alone may not suffice to make the rightholder whole. Compensation calculated on that basis alone can fall short of the damage actually suffered, not least because it does not necessarily account for the costs of investigating and identifying the infringement, or for other consequential harm.
This case law is of particular interest in the context of Fendi v Rolo Fashion, because Regulation 3 reproduces the same architecture. It requires damages to be appropriate to the actual prejudice suffered and provides two methods: taking all appropriate aspects into account, including negative economic consequences, unfair profits and moral prejudice; or, where appropriate, an award on the basis of royalties or fees which would have been due had the defendant obtained a licence.
The comparison then regains its force. With nothing on which to base an appropriate royalty, HHJ Hacon deliberately takes a “bare minimum” of 3%:
“since there is no evidence on which an appropriate royalty can be based, I will assume that the licence royalty which the claimants would have charged was a bare minimum, which I will assess at 3% of the defendants’ selling price”.
Article 13(1)(b), for its part, treats the royalty that would normally have been due as “at least” the reference point for a lump-sum award. The symmetry is striking: in one case evidential uncertainty pushes the judge towards a cautious minimum; in the other, the European legislature makes the normal royalty a reference threshold from which the loss may be assessed.
The difference is not merely lexical. In the logic of the Directive as interpreted by the Court of Justice, the hypothetical royalty is not necessarily the natural ceiling of compensation. It is an instrument for putting a lump-sum figure on a loss whose contours are hard to trace. The harm caused by an unlawful use is not necessarily identical to the price a lawful use would have commanded. None of which shows that a court in a Member State would have awarded more on the facts of Fendi v Rolo Fashion.
What the comparison does yield is a difference of emphasis: in the scheme of the Directive, the hypothetical royalty is less the imaginary price of a licence than one of the instruments capable of leading to compensation for the loss.
The judgment thus leaves largely open the place to be given to the infringer’s profits where they do not correspond to a loss directly proved by the rightholder.
The difficulty sits at the heart of Regulation 3. It lays down that damages must be “appropriate to the actual prejudice” suffered by the claimant. But it also provides that, in making the award, all appropriate aspects are to be taken into account, including not only the negative economic consequences of the infringement, and lost profits in particular, but also “any unfair profits made by the defendant”. The provision invites the court to look in two directions: towards what the rightholder has lost, and towards what the infringer has gained.
How those two perspectives fit together is far from obvious. The infringer’s profits are not made a free-standing head of damage by Regulation 3: they are one of the factors to be taken into account in determining the damages due to the claimant. The difficulty is at its sharpest where the infringer’s gain does not match the rightholder’s loss. Not every counterfeit sale translates into a lost genuine sale. The profit derived from the infringement may therefore reveal an economic reality that the rightholder’s lost profit alone does not fully capture.
Here the European origin of Regulation 3 becomes relevant again. The same tension runs through Article 13(1)(a): “unfair profits made by the infringer” sit alongside lost profits among the factors relevant to damages appropriate to the prejudice actually suffered. Recital 26 makes clear that the Directive is not intended to introduce an obligation to provide for punitive damages. That limit nonetheless leaves open the question of what weight to give the express reference to the infringer’s profits.
The judgment is not silent on the point. HHJ Hacon cites Henderson v All Around the World Recordings Ltd [2014] EWHC 3087 (IPEC), where he had observed that Article 13 does not seem to cater expressly for the cynical defendant who calculates that his benefit from infringement is sure to outweigh the actual prejudice suffered by the claimant, making infringement an attractive option; the answer, he suggested, might be that the court would readily infer actual prejudice going beyond lost sales, making extra compensation appropriate. He immediately adds a limit: a finding of cynical infringement does not mean that further prejudice must be assumed where there is no evidential basis for it.
On the substance, then, he does not decide. His refusal to make a further award turns on the inadequacy of the argument before him, not on any exclusion in principle of unfair profits. He says he would need more detailed argument on the meaning of unfair profits and why they arise in this case. Fendi v Rolo Fashion thus leaves standing a question written into Regulation 3 itself: how is the infringer’s gain to be brought within compensation still conceived from the rightholder’s actual prejudice?
Measuring the loss from digital counterfeiting
Beyond the £213,000 finally awarded, the case reveals a difficulty now familiar in the fight against online counterfeiting: it can be far easier to prove that unlawful trading exists than to reconstruct its economics.
Digital trade leaves traces everywhere and accounts nowhere. Social networks, private messaging, e-commerce platforms, payment accounts and dropshipping arrangements generate a mass of data. But that data is scattered across different operators, sometimes in several countries, and does not necessarily establish how many products were sold, to whom, at what price and over what period.
The case is an almost perfect illustration. The WhatsApp group demonstrated the existence and activity of a distribution network, but its membership figure could not show how many members had actually bought. The bank data revealed financial flows without always identifying their source. The messages supplied further indications, while some images had gone. And disclosure remained partial.
The judge therefore had to proceed by cross-reference, correction and extrapolation. The approach echoes the concern expressed in recital 26 of Directive 2004/48: where the amount of the prejudice is difficult to determine, its assessment cannot be paralysed by the impossibility of establishing its exact extent. Hence the possibility, in certain circumstances, of a lump-sum award based on material that approximates the economic value of the infringement.
Uncertainty does not extinguish the loss. It shifts the question to the method capable of measuring it.
From monitoring to evidence
A final, more practical lesson can be drawn from the decision.
Online brand monitoring is generally conceived in terms of detection and reaction: identify an offending listing, account, site or domain name and secure its rapid removal. But the disappearance of the infringement online may also carry away some of the traces that would later establish its extent.
A damages inquiry requires more than a collection of screenshots showing that counterfeits were offered for sale. Sometimes an entire trading history has to be reconstructed: how long the goods were marketed, how many were offered, how prices varied, how often posts were made, the size and activity of private groups, the identity of successive accounts, payment methods, the rhythm of transactions.
A listing taken down ends one manifestation of the infringement. A listing documented beforehand can become evidence.
The distinction matters. Detecting counterfeiting, stopping it and obtaining compensation for it are three separate exercises. The last requires the material gathered in the course of the first two to be turned into evidence capable of reconstructing the scale of the infringing activity and, from there, of valuing the loss. That is probably where the most contemporary lesson of Fendi v Rolo Fashion lies. Online, finding the counterfeit is no longer enough. Its traces have to be preserved. Because, in the last analysis, a court can only put a price on what it is allowed to see.
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IP Twins assists rights holders in protecting their brands online. Our Online Brand Protection services help detect and document infringements across websites, marketplaces, social media and other digital platforms, and implement appropriate enforcement measures.
Beyond removing infringing content, preserving and organising the evidence collected through online monitoring can also help build a robust evidentiary record where rights holders contemplate legal proceedings, including claims for damages.