Livestream e-commerce has become one of the fastest-growing channels in China’s online retail market, but it has also introduced new complexities for rights holders seeking to combat counterfeit and copycat products.
Real-time selling, fragmented evidence, account switching and replacement-entity operations can make it more challenging to prove infringement, identify responsible parties and secure effective remedies.
Two recent civil cases handled by this author – one resulting in an award of Rmb10 million (approximately $1.5 million) in punitive damages and the other in an award of Rmb5 million ($740,000) in maximum statutory damages – reveal the practical challenges of livestream IP infringement in China and present strategies that may help rights holders pursue stronger enforcement outcomes.
China’s online retail market continues to grow, according to statistics published by the National Bureau of Statistics.
At the same time, third-party industry analysts suggest a divergence between traditional shelf-based e-commerce and livestream commerce. Growth in the former has slowed, while the latter continues to expand at a significantly faster pace.
That shift is important for rights holders. Livestream e-commerce’s low barriers to entry, high traffic concentration and rapid monetisation have attracted large numbers of small streamers, micro-businesses and individual operators.
These same features have also created new practical issues for traditional IP enforcement strategies. Compared with the relatively standardised and static operating model of traditional e-commerce, infringement in livestream settings often presents a different evidential and litigation profile.
In traditional shelf-based e-commerce, infringing product listings may remain visible for extended periods, store operators are comparatively stable and transaction records are often easier to trace. Rights holders can therefore rely on post-event evidence collection and platform complaint procedures to pursue relatively routine enforcement.
Livestream commerce operates differently. It is built around real-time, content-led selling. Infringing conduct may therefore be instantaneous, fragmented, dynamic and difficult to preserve in full for the following reasons:
As a result, livestream infringement often requires a more tailored evidence and enforcement strategy, particularly in industries such as fashion and luxury goods, where these issues arise frequently.
IP infringement cases involving livestream sales tend to raise four recurring practical challenges:
These issues can, in some cases, make it more difficult for rights holders to obtain higher damages and to address repeat infringement in a comprehensive way.
A defining feature of livestream selling is real-time transaction activity. Product displays, comparative references to well-known brands and misleading promotional statements may appear only briefly during the broadcast itself. To reduce the risk of platform scrutiny or rights holder action, infringers may rotate product listings, shut down stores, cancel accounts and move between livestream rooms.
As a result, traces of infringement are often not preserved for long. Traditional methods (eg, screenshots and short video captures) usually record only isolated fragments of a single stream. They may not sufficiently reconstruct the infringer’s sustained commercial conduct or the full scale of the operation, which can make it harder to meet the evidential threshold for higher damages.
Livestream infringement often involves multiple actors, including manufacturers, suppliers, store operators, hosts and MCN agencies.
The boundaries of responsibility between them are often not immediately clear. In practice, larger-scale infringing operations may be run as co-ordinated networks, with the real operator controlling multiple accounts, stores and presenters while presenting them as separate businesses.
Where each individual store or account appears to generate only modest sales, the traditional ‘one store, one action’ or ‘one account, one action’ model may fail to identify the controlling party and can leave the underlying operation largely unaffected. This makes it more difficult to address the conduct at its source.
In traditional e-commerce cases, rights holders can often rely on publicly visible information (eg, product listings, historical sales volumes and customer reviews) to estimate the scale of infringement.
In livestream commerce, by contrast, there may be no stable product listing, and key transaction data is generally held only in the platform back end. Front-end users often cannot access cumulative sales figures, operating periods or other core metrics.
This creates an evidential issue. Rights holders may be unable to prove that the infringement was continuous, frequent and large-scale through self-collected evidence alone.
That may have direct consequences for damages. At the filing stage, limited evidence may make it harder for the claimant to support a higher-value claim, which can in turn affect court jurisdiction.
At trial, if back-end data is not obtained from the platform and damages are assessed primarily on the basis of front-end evidence, the damages awarded may be more limited than the rights holder considers appropriate.
Many infringers respond to complaints, administrative penalties or litigation by changing the operating entity, switching accounts or moving to a different livestream room.
Formally, this may create the appearance of a new business. In substance, however, the same operational team may continue the same infringing activity.
Although this tactic is also seen in traditional e-commerce infringement, the nature of livestream commerce makes this pattern more frequent.
This type of concealed continuity can make it difficult for rights holders to prove repeated infringement or subjective bad faith.
It may also create practical obstacles for courts considering whether the legal conditions for punitive damages have been met.
To respond to these practical challenges, rights holders and their counsel often need to move beyond superficial evidence collection and single-point claims.
Based on the author’s experience in multiple disputes involving well-known fashion brands, a more effective approach combines three elements:
This strategy helped to secure, in separate civil trademark infringement cases, a Rmb5 million maximum statutory damages award and a Rmb10 million punitive damages award.
Together, those cases illustrate a practical enforcement pathway that is better suited to the infringement patterns increasingly seen in livestream commerce.
They also show that, where rights holders can present a sufficiently robust and well-structured evidential record, Chinese courts are prepared to grant meaningful remedies in appropriate cases.
Large-scale livestream infringement often follows a ‘multiple accounts, multiple stores, single controller’ model. On paper, several independent business entities appear to operate separately. In reality, the same team may control supply, operations and profit extraction across the network.
Rights holders should therefore consider moving beyond the traditional model of suing only the nominal operator of a single store or account. Instead, they may seek to identify hidden organisational links between stores, accounts and livestream rooms through cross-comparison of multiple factual indicators. These includes:
By systematically extracting and preserving common features across different infringing touchpoints, rights holders may be able to demonstrate operational unity.
This type of evidence can:
It also enables the courts to look beyond formal separation created by business registration and address practical problems such as fragmented responsibility and continued infringement through replacement accounts.
Because front-end evidence in livestream cases is highly fragmented, rights holders should consider a layered evidence strategy combining real-time notarised evidence capture, back-end data retrieval and systematic screening of infringing data based on common features of the infringing products.
On the front end, monitor target livestream rooms continuously and store notarised recordings made across different time periods to capture key aspects of the stream, including:
This helps to preserve the real-time state of the infringement as it occurs.
On the back end, rights holders should, pursuant to the applicable rules on civil evidence, consider applying for a court order requiring the platform to disclose operational data relating to the stores or accounts at issue, including:
Once obtained, such data may be combined with the batch identification and screening of common features of the infringing products to reconstruct, with substantially greater completeness, the infringer’s sustained, frequent and large-scale commercial activity.
Even where back-end data cannot be obtained through the court, rights holders may still, on the basis of the identified common features of the infringing listings, filter and aggregate infringing sales data reflected in front-end evidence across different stores or accounts.
This approach is particularly useful in rebutting common defence arguments that the conduct was isolated, accidental or minor.
More importantly, it provides a stronger factual basis for a court to assess the seriousness of the infringement and to consider higher statutory damages or, where the legal threshold is met, punitive damages.
Under Chinese law, punitive damages require not only serious infringement, but also a sufficiently strong showing of subjective bad faith.
In one case handled by the author, the infringing party had previously been subject to administrative penalties for similar infringing conduct. It then sought to reduce further legal exposure by concealing the identity of the real controller and continuing the same activity through a newly established company, newly registered livestream accounts and newly operated stores nominally unrelated to the original infringer.
To address this structure, the case strategy focused on systematic comparison across the periods before and after the change of entities and accounts.
Key factors included the business model, livestream scenes, product-specific QR code markings, product style system and supply channels.
This made it possible to build a complete chain of associated evidence showing that, although the old and new entities were formally distinct, both were in fact controlled by the same person and the infringement was continuous, repeated and deliberately structured to avoid liability.
The court accepted this evidential framework, looked beyond the formal separation between the entities, imposed personal joint and several liability on the actual controller, and found repeated infringement, deliberate attempts to avoid liability and large-scale malicious conduct.
On that basis, the court applied punitive damages and awarded damages in the eight-figure range.
In another matter handled by the author, a complete evidential chain linking multiple entities was combined with targeted screening and analysis of front-end transaction data across different stores and accounts.
This demonstrated that the infringement was broad in scope, long in duration, large in transaction volume and highly profitable.
On that factual basis, the court awarded the maximum level of statutory damages available.
The commercial structure of livestream e-commerce means that its infringement patterns and enforcement logic differ materially from those of traditional shelf-based e-commerce.
Instantaneity, concealment, organised operation and iterative re-emergence mean that conventional enforcement models may not always be sufficient on their own.
For rights holders, effective enforcement in the livestream context often requires a more penetrating, systematic and data-driven strategy.
By combining analysis of the infringing network, analysis of sales data and a closed evidential chain demonstrating bad faith, rights holders can materially improve their prospects of securing substantial damages while also targeting organised and recurring infringing activity at its source.
Recent cases also suggest that, within the existing legal framework, Chinese courts are willing to adopt a more penetrating analysis of livestream infringement structures and to grant stronger remedies where the evidence justifies it.
In this sense, stronger outcomes in livestream infringement cases depend not simply on more evidence, but on better-structured evidence and a more integrated enforcement approach.
This article was first published in WTR in August 2026.
