By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter

Online shopping malls are banned from selling and displaying product replicas on their Web sites.

The Seoul Central District Court ordered Thursday the nation's top three Internet shopping malls ㅡ G-Market (www.gmarket.co.kr), Auction (www.auction.co.kr) and Interpark (www.interpark.com) ㅡ to stop selling fakes under regular brand names.

The three have run business under the so-called ``open market'' principle, whereby sellers pay a certain fee to have images of what they sell individually displayed.

The ruling came as a Korean firm owning exclusive rights to the trademark ``Hinoki system'' in Korean sued the three shopping malls for trademark violation.

The court said, ``The trademark rights holder asked the three shopping mall operators to ban individual sellers from selling fake products with the trademark on May 29 and they accepted. But it remained rampant in the Web sites.''

``The three Web sites are not directly involved in selling the fakes but they must hold responsibility for weeding out the illegal practice. It is because they receive commissions from individual sellers, including from the trademark holder.''

Internet shopping mall operators criticized the ruling, saying the court failed to distinguish the difference between regular online shopping malls and those with an ``open market'' principle.

``Those running under the open market system just link individual sellers and customers. But the latest ruling defined them as product distributors as if they are the same as regular Internet shopping malls that definitely hold responsibility for such wrongdoings,'' Cho Hyun-chan, spokesman for the Korea On-Line Shopping Association, told The Korea Times.

Cho said the association would strengthen monitoring in cooperation with Internet shopping sites.

The number of shopping malls adopting the open market system is rising, with more than 30 on the Web. Their sales topped $5 billion in 2006, 27 percent of total Internet shopping sales.

pss@koreatimes.co.kr