After trademark infringement occurs, the rights holder has four main routes: e-commerce platform complaints, administrative enforcement by market regulators, civil litigation, and criminal referral—plus auxiliary measures such as cease-and-desist letters, customs recordal, and opposition or invalidation. The four routes differ in what they solve, their cost, and their timeline; enforcement effectiveness depends on selecting the right route for the case and combining routes correctly, rather than driving a single route to the end.
1. Comparison of the Four Main Routes
1. E-Commerce Platform Complaints
- Basis: the notice-and-takedown rules in Articles 42–45 of the E-Commerce Law, and each platform's IP protection system;
- What you can obtain: removal or blocking of links, store demerits, up to closure;
- What you cannot obtain: damages; no effect on offline infringement;
- Cost and timeline: essentially zero cost, from a few days to two weeks;
- Applicability: rapid takedown of infringing listings sold online; the first move in nearly all e-commerce infringement cases.
2. Administrative Enforcement (Market Regulation Authorities)
- Basis: Article 60 of the Trademark Law; complaints to the market regulation authority at or above the county level where the infringement occurs;
- What you can obtain: orders to stop the infringement, confiscation and destruction of infringing goods and counterfeiting tools, fines; coercive measures such as on-site inspection and seizure; mediation of the damages amount;
- What you cannot obtain: the administrative decision itself does not award damages; if mediation fails, litigation is still required;
- Cost and timeline: no fee; investigation proceeds quickly after docketing; overall one to several months;
- Applicability: infringement with physical dens, warehouses, or manufacturing links, where public power is needed to cut off the supply chain quickly.
3. Civil Litigation
- Basis: Articles 57 and 63 of the Trademark Law; suit filed with the court where the infringement occurred or where the defendant is domiciled;
- What you can obtain: a judgment ordering cessation, damages (actual losses / infringer's profits / multiple of the license fee / statutory damages up to RMB 5 million), punitive damages of one to five times, reasonable expenses, conduct preservation and evidence preservation;
- Cost and timeline: attorney fees, notarization fees, and court fees; first instance usually takes more than six months, and complex cases run across years;
- Applicability: cases with large losses requiring compensation, injunctions, or a precedent-setting judgment to deter peers.
4. Criminal Referral
- Basis: Article 67 of the Trademark Law links to Articles 213–215 of the Criminal Law (crime of counterfeiting registered trademarks, crime of selling goods bearing counterfeit registered trademarks, crime of illegally manufacturing registered trademark labels);
- What you can obtain: personal penalties and fines against the source of manufacturing and selling fakes, with account books, inventories, and the upstream and downstream chain fixed during investigation;
- Threshold: criminal filing standards for illegal business volume or illegal gains must be met, and the public security bureau must open a case;
- Applicability: large-scale manufacturing and selling of fakes, or organized, dens-based infringement, where deterrence is strongest.
2. Decision Matrix
Locate the route with three questions:
- Where is the infringement? Purely online listings—platform complaints as the main route; physical dens—administrative enforcement; import and export links—customs recordal plus detention;
- What outcome do you want? Takedown only—platform plus warning letter; hitting the dens—administrative; money—litigation; deterrence—criminal;
- Is the evidence sufficient? With weak evidence, collect it first (notarized purchases, page fixation) before acting; in major cases, never send a letter first and alert the other side.
3. Combination Strategies
The most common efficient combinations in practice:
- Standard playbook: monitoring detects, notarized evidence collection, platform complaint and takedown to stop the bleeding, administrative enforcement against the dens, then a civil suit for damages using the enforcement decision and seized account books as evidence;
- Criminal-led: where criminal thresholds are met, report directly, use the investigation to fix the whole-chain evidence, then bring a concurrent or separate civil action;
- Defensive coordination: trademark monitoring watches announcements to prevent squatting, customs recordal blocks imports and exports, and warning letters clean up mild infringement at low cost while fixing evidence of bad faith.
4. Timeline and Cost Planning
- Stop the bleeding first: while listings are live and inventory is moving, losses grow every day; platform complaints and administrative enforcement should start within one week;
- Plan compensation for the long term: litigation takes long; evidence of damages (sales data, account books, fame materials) must be prepared months in advance;
- Budget allocation: scattered small infringement is handled with platform complaints plus lawyer letters to control cost; leading counterfeiting sources deserve administrative and criminal resources; do not spend evenly on every small retail outlet.
5. Positioning of Auxiliary Measures
Beyond the four main routes, several tools significantly improve overall effectiveness:
- Warning letter: a low-cost first move against mild, non-malicious infringement that also fixes evidence of the other side's knowledge, laying the groundwork for a bad-faith finding in punitive damages; but use caution against large-scale counterfeiters to avoid tipping them off;
- Customs recordal: brands with import/export business or a risk of fake goods leaving the country should record the trademark with the General Administration of Customs, which can detain suspect goods on its own initiative—pushing the defense line to the border;
- Opposition and invalidation: where the infringer has also squatted similar marks, file opposition during the announcement period or invalidation after registration, stripping away the rights cloak used against you;
- Conduct preservation: where losses keep growing during litigation, the court may be asked to order the other side to immediately stop the relevant conduct, stopping the bleeding before judgment.
These measures are interleaved with the four main routes according to the case, forming a complete enforcement toolkit.
6. Strategy Emphasis by Entity
- Startups and small brands: with a limited budget, focus on monitoring plus platform complaints plus lawyer letters, reserving administrative resources for true dens cases;
- Growing brands: build fixed mechanisms for monitoring, evidence collection, and ledgers; plan one or two landmark lawsuits each year to raise infringers' expected costs;
- Well-known and overseas brands: deploy all routes, plus customs recordal and overseas platform complaint channels; pursue criminal referral resolutely against organized counterfeiting;
- From the accused side: after receiving a complaint or summons, also evaluate the routes—defenses such as legitimate source, three-year non-use, and prior use can change the case, and countermeasures such as non-use cancellation or invalidation may be used against the other side's rights when necessary.
7. Common Misconceptions
- Complaining without collecting evidence: once the link is deleted the evidence is gone, leaving nothing for later litigation;
- Hitting retail endpoints without tracing the source: small shops can escape damages with the legitimate source defense, and fakes quickly reappear under a new name;
- Ignoring the stability of one's own rights: before enforcing, check whether the trademark is within its term and whether there is evidence of use within the last three years, or the other side may counter with a non-use cancellation;
- Misuse of warning letters: unfounded allegations, or sending a letter before collecting evidence, both put you on the defensive.
Rights enforcement is a systems engineering effort: monitoring is the eyes, fixed evidence is the foundation, and the four routes are the tools—combined by case, they resolve problems both fast and decisively.
8. Service Entry
To engage the services described above, you may submit a trademark monitoring request on MyTMBee, and a filed trademark agent will follow up.