Trademark enforcement is a war of evidence: platform complaints need evidence, administrative enforcement needs evidence, and the damages amount in litigation is decided by evidence. Organized by three groups—rights, infringement, and damages—this guide explains collection methods, fixation techniques, and the timing of preservation, and applies to complaints, administrative enforcement, litigation, and criminal referral.
1. The Three-Group Structure of Evidence
Rights Group: Proving You Have the Right
- Trademark registration certificate and transfer, change, and renewal certificates, forming a continuous and complete chain of title;
- Where enforcement is in the licensee's name, the license contract and authorization documents;
- Evidence of trademark use and fame: sales contracts and invoices, advertising contracts, media reports, awards, and market share materials from the last three years. This group should be archived routinely—it supports confusion and well-knownness findings and defends against the other side's three-year non-use defense and cancellation counterattack.
Infringement Group: Proving They Infringe
- Physical evidence: the infringing goods themselves, packaging, labels, and instructions;
- Conduct evidence: sales pages, store information, promotional materials, trade fair photos, and store videos;
- Chain evidence: complete records of the process from search entry through ordering, payment, and receipt, proving the goods were indeed sold by the accused party;
- Scale evidence: page sales figures, inventory, review counts, prices, and the relationships among multiple stores and links.
Damages Group: Proving Your Losses and Their Profits
- Your losses: comparative sales over the same period, materials on damage to the price system, and financial data on profit decline;
- Their profits: extrapolations of sales volume times unit price, platform back-end data (obtainable through courts or administrative authorities), and seized account books;
- License-fee reference: your own historical license contracts and rates for the trademark;
- Reasonable expenses: all receipts for notarization, purchase, attorney, travel, and authentication fees;
- Bad-faith evidence: records of service of warning letters and the other side's prior penalties or lawsuits, supporting punitive damages.
2. Collection Methods
- Notarized purchase: buying online or on site under a notary's witness, with the goods sealed and a notarial certificate issued—this carries the highest credibility, and core litigation evidence relies on it;
- Webpage notarization: notarize key pages (sales, promotion, store qualifications) to prevent deletion of links;
- Trusted timestamps and blockchain fixation: low cost and batch-capable, suited to routine fixation of large numbers of links; key pages in major cases merit double insurance of timestamp plus notarization;
- On-site collection: go with two or more persons, photograph and video with time, location, door numbers, and business licenses recorded, and write up written summaries afterwards;
- Leveraging public power: administrative enforcement transcripts, seizure inventories, and criminal case files can be used directly as evidence; in litigation, apply for investigation orders to obtain platform data and bank flows;
- Authentication and comparison: genuine-versus-fake comparison reports and trademark similarity analyses—self-produced reports may be supplemented by authentication from qualified institutions.
3. Technical Standards for Fixation
- Authenticity: the collection process must be reproducible, screenshots carry URLs and timestamps, and videos are unedited;
- Relevance: each piece of evidence maps to a specific accused party and specific conduct;
- Legality: evidence obtained through illegal intrusion or entrapment may be excluded;
- Completeness: key pages retain full context, avoiding decontextualized challenges.
4. Timing of Evidence Preservation
Where evidence may be lost or become hard to obtain later, seek preservation decisively:
- Pre-litigation preservation: in urgent situations where failure to act immediately would cause the evidence to be lost, apply to the court at the evidence's location before filing suit; suit must be filed within thirty days after preservation measures are taken;
- In-litigation preservation: for account books, inventory, and back-end data held by the other side, apply for the court to order production or seizure; unjustified refusal to produce allows the court to determine by reference to the rights holder's claims;
- Seizure in administrative proceedings likewise serves a preservation function—this is the evidentiary value of the enforcement-then-litigation combination.
5. Organization and Submission
- Catalog by the rights, infringement, and damages groups, noting the purpose of each piece of evidence;
- Organize a timeline: start and end of the infringement, collection dates, letter dates, and complaint dates, clear at a glance;
- Mind the evidentiary deadlines: platform appeal windows and court-designated deadlines; late submission may forfeit the right—submit supplementary evidence promptly with reasons.
6. Points of Proof in Different Procedures
- Platform complaints: focus on sign comparison and authentication; formal requirements are loose but the ground must be right;
- Administrative enforcement: submit rights proof, infringement leads, and preliminary evidence; the enforcement agency conducts the in-depth investigation, and you may apply to inspect and copy case materials for later litigation;
- Civil litigation: submit cataloged by the three groups, minding the deadlines; for account books and data held by the defendant, promptly apply in writing for the court to order production or investigate—missing the application window directly affects the damages finding;
- Criminal referral: provide rights proof, genuine-versus-fake comparison, transaction samples, and a lead list to help the public security authorities assess the criminal thresholds, and cooperate with identification after docketing.
7. Common Collection Mistakes
- Complaining before collecting: once links are deleted and goods taken down, physical and sales evidence is lost;
- Screenshots without URLs or timestamps: authenticity cannot be verified;
- Exposed purchaser identity: ordering with an account obviously connected to the rights holder invites a sting-operation challenge;
- Missing receipts: no invoices for enforcement expenses means reasonable expenses go unsupported;
- Unsupported self-made comparisons: a genuine-versus-fake comparison with conclusions but no itemized differences carries weak probative force.
8. Routine Evidence Management
Evidence awareness should be embedded in daily operations: archive evidence of trademark use year by year (against cancellation and to support fame), keep purchase and license contracts properly, and fix suspected leads found through monitoring before acting. Make evidence management an institution, and enforcement becomes execution rather than last-minute cramming.
Finally, emphasize chain-of-evidence thinking: a single piece of evidence, however polished, can be isolated and challenged; what truly decides a case is whether pieces corroborate one another—the notarial certificate corresponds to the physical goods, the goods to the purchase record, the purchase record to the defendant, and the sales data to the damages calculation. When collecting, always ask what this piece corroborates and which fact it points to; once the chain is closed, complaints, penalties, and judgments all follow smoothly.
9. Service Entry
For the specific procedures above, you may book trademark monitoring on MyTMBee, and a filed trademark agent will provide full assistance.