Due to increasing complaints, and thankfully only threatened lawsuits, we decided to remove all mentions of brand names from RepArchive and our sister site RepLadies.co.
We make it absolutely clear on every single page that we do not sell any items and that RepArchive only lists information from external pages, almost like a search engine, but cannot verify the information or give any warranty for it’s correctness. This includes the branding. RepArchive listings should never be understood as advertisements, they are a collection of information from different sources for educational purposes.
In order to further distance ourselves from trademark and brand owners, we removed all mentions of brand names in our listings. Sadly, this will also include legal and authentic items.
While we do not profit from the sale of items anyways, with the new measure we want to make sure no brand feels like we use their name for our profit. We hope this will stop google and other search engines from showing our items for search queries including a brand name in their search engine, but just like any other external sites, we cannot force them to.
We do everything we can to stop the unauthorized sale of branded goods. But we believe if items make it to the taobao/weidian marketplace, we can talk about them for informational and review purposes, as they’ve been vetted by taobao/weidian. Nevertheless, we still warn users that they might be purchasing items that are not authentic and that they should get confirmation from the brand owner before placing an order.
Cooperation with brands
We follow every request and take down the items in question instantly.
In order to help we tell every brand that contacts us is the same: We will absolutely cooperate to remove the items in question from our page, but in order to stop the sale, they have to contact the seller or taobao directly. Items listed on taobao/weidian and are solely taobao’s/weidian’s responsibility. RepArchive does not take responsibility for external pages.
What this means for the user
We know that this makes finding items more complicated. In terms of visitor experience it’s definitely a step back.
We’ve been observing that for visitors RepArchive has been becoming a place to find well researched guides and news and seller contacts with a growing interest over simple items. This shift gives us hope that we can still provide a growing value to our visitors, even after taking this drastic step.
How you can help
This is a big change. We already invested many hours to change the names. Taking action is hard, because we don’t know every brand that exists. Of course the most popular brands are covered, but our content is user submitted, so chances are a user submits a link with a name we never heard before. We will try to perfect our brand-name-detection. In the meantime the best way to get items removed is still to report them through the contact function. This can and should be done by community members and copyright owners.
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