On Tuesday, Shein was sued after claims that the company operates by looking for and taking the intellectual property of designers. The lawsuit also stated that Shein uses a confusing corporate structure that leads to the company being able to shift around claims of theft with barely any legal consequences.
Shein is known to be a fast fashion retailer.
Krista Perry, Larissa Martinez, and Jay Baron, independent designers, have claimed that Shein has been “producing, distributing, and selling exact copies of their creative works.”
The lawsuit adds that Shein has a private algorithm thats purpose is to pick out fashion trends and intentionally make a small portion of an allegedly stolen product just in case infringement claims arise. If Shein is said to have stolen a product, they are able to swiftly fix the issue. If no problems arise, then they produce more of the product.
Essentially, the lawsuit claims that if any infringement allegations come about, Shein would place the blame on an independent company when really these entities are linked back to Shein.
The lawsuit claims that Shein has “knowingly committed criminal copyright infringement, and played its role with full knowledge of the overarching criminal copyright infringement it participates in.” This brings in a RICO claim into the lawsuit.
The designers have said that Shein’s measures to throw off infringement lawsuits are, according to, The Fashion Law, “committed not by a single entity, but by a de-facto association of entities. And just as intended by Congress, the same decentralization that facilitates Shein’s criminal infringement and other racketeering activity, renders individual components of the enterprise, such as Defendants, liable under civil RICO.”
