Intellectual property and how to file a notice

The words here are ours. Many of the photographs are not.

深圳市水润天成实业有限公司 (Shenzhen Sunning Tension Industrial Co., Ltd.) publishes yourchinapartner.com. No supplier uploads anything here, no factory has an account that can publish, and no factory's telephone number, email address or WeChat ID appears anywhere on these pages. Every product title, every specification line, every summary and every translation in the catalogue was written by someone we employ, and that is the part of a listing we own outright. The photographs are a different matter, and this page says so plainly rather than leaving you to discover it: a product photograph on a listing here is often the manufacturer's own catalogue image of the same goods, taken from a public listing of them. We did not take it, we do not claim the copyright in it, and we are the party that decided to publish it. Where those images come from, what we record about each one and how to have one removed has a section of its own below. This policy covers that catalogue and the goods we source through it.

We should say what we are not putting forward, because a policy that leaves that vague is worse than one that concedes it. Where a factory we deal with has given us its catalogue images to use, we have its permission and the record for that image says so. Where an image came off a public listing and nobody has given us anything, we hold no licence and we do not invent one — not an implied licence, not a trade custom, not a fair-use exception, none of which would survive contact with either of the copyright statutes on this page. What we have instead is a complete record of where every such file came from, and a removal route that costs you nothing to use. The rest of this page is largely about those two things.

Which company sells depends on the listing, and the listing says which it is. Everything on sale here today is sold by Shenzhen Sunning Tension Industrial Co., Ltd., the company that publishes this site — it holds the contract with you and carries a seller's liability for the goods, which is what the Official Factory mark on those listings means. Once a member factory lists here, that factory will sell in its own name and you will pay it direct. Neither arrangement makes this a noticeboard between you and a seller: we chose the product, wrote the listing and published it. Every supplier in the book is a factory — we do not list trading intermediaries — no buyer is charged a fee here, and what a member factory pays us is a membership and a commission on a closed deal. There is no version of that arithmetic in which a counterfeit pays better than the genuine article, so we do not list a counterfeit, a replica or a knock-off at any margin, for any buyer, at any price.

Here is the honest limit. A registered design that nobody outside its owner's market has ever heard of is invisible in a photograph. We can see a brand name and we can see an obvious copy, but we cannot look at an enclosure and know that its curve is registered in Germany. That gap is what this page exists to close, and closing it needs you to tell us.

The law that reaches us, because we published it

We publish this catalogue from China, so Chinese law is where this starts. Article 1194 of the Civil Code makes anyone who infringes another's rights through a network liable for it — network user and network service provider alike — and that is the article with our name on it, because we are the one who published. Article 1195 builds the notice-and-takedown shelter, but it shelters a provider from what its users post, and nobody posts here but us. Not everything here came off our desk — the photographs above did not, and neither does a company name we publish at a factory's request — but Article 1195 does not reach those either, because the shelter it builds is for what a user posted, and nobody posted these. We went and fetched them, and our own staff decided listing by listing to publish them. So we take the two things that mechanism requires — prima facie evidence of the infringement, and the rights holder's real identity — as our own working standard for a full notice, while accepting the liability the article does not shelter us from.

Article 1197 makes a provider that knew or ought to have known and did nothing jointly liable with the infringer. We sit past that article rather than inside it, because we are the publisher and not a provider carrying somebody else's post — but the standard it sets is why a notice moves fast here. It is also why every photograph is read before it goes up — by machine now rather than by eye, which the photographs section below sets out in full — even though that reading answers only a question about what is printed inside the picture and cannot answer the copyright question at all.

Articles 41 to 45 of the E-Commerce Law set out the notice, takedown and counter-notice duties of a platform operator — a business that lets two parties transact independently through it. We are not one today, and we will be one the day a member factory sells to a buyer here in its own name; the terms of use set out what that obliges us to do. What follows is written to satisfy those articles now rather than on the day they attach. There is no checkout, no price a buyer and a factory can agree between themselves, and no way for an order to be placed here. A buyer may message a factory on this site, and that channel is ours — we can read it, and contact details in it stay hidden until we release them — so it is not premises on which two parties transact independently. The privacy policy explains why the enquiry routing is a fact about the schema rather than a promise about our conduct. So we mirror that architecture below because it is well designed, not because it binds us, and we stand behind this catalogue as its publisher.

The Singapore safe harbour we are not claiming either

Singapore is the other place this site touches — the database, the functions and the mail are there, though nobody works there — so the same question gets asked a second time under Singapore law, and the answer comes out the same. Most marketplace IP policies are built on a safe harbour: the site hosts what other people upload, so once it removes the material a court is barred from awarding money against it and confined to a short menu of orders. That is what Singapore's Copyright Act 2021 actually gives in sections 315 to 319 — not immunity from suit, a restriction of remedies. The four gateways are a conduit, a cache, storage at the direction of a user, and a search or linking tool. None of them is open to us. Section 318 requires the copy to be stored at the direction of a user, and there are no users here. Every word is ours, and every photograph is on this site because a member of our staff went and got it and chose to put it there — which is the furthest thing from a file stored at somebody else's direction. The change in where our photographs come from makes that denial stronger rather than weaker: a file we fetched ourselves is more plainly our own act than one a supplier handed us.

Regulation 74(2) of the Copyright Regulations 2021 shuts the same door from the other side. It conditions every one of those sections on adopting and implementing a policy for terminating the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe. This paragraph used to say we had no accounts to terminate; that stopped being true when buyer accounts and factory portal logins opened, so the sentence has been corrected rather than left standing. The condition still fails, for the reason above and not for that one: the sections it conditions reach only material stored at the direction of a user, and nothing on the public side of this site is. A factory can now sign in and submit a product and its business licence (营业执照), and none of that appears until our own staff have read it, written the listing and published it. If that ever changes — if anything a user uploads is ever served without a person here choosing to publish it — a repeat-infringer policy is the first thing that would have to be written, and this page would say so before it happened rather than after.

Section 26 of the Electronic Transactions Act 2010 is the general, non-copyright version of the same idea, and it is unavailable for the same reason: it protects a provider against third-party material to which it merely provides access, and a listing our staff selected, wrote and published is not material we merely provide access to, whatever its origin. Copyright is carved out of section 26 in any event and routed to the Copyright Act. We do not invoke it.

That has a consequence you should read before the rest of this page, because it runs through all of it. The Copyright Act's notice machinery — the prescribed form of a take-down notice, the particulars it must carry, the criminal penalty for lying in one, the restoration timetable — is machinery built for notices served on a provider that is relying on sections 316 to 319. We are not such a provider, so none of it reaches a notice you send us. Where this page names one of those provisions below, it is naming a standard we have chosen to hold ourselves and you to, not a duty either of us owes under it.

Where the product photographs come from

Every photograph on a published listing here is the manufacturer’s own catalogue image of the goods, taken from a public listing of the same product, and the record says so one row at a time. That is not a generalisation: it is what the record holds for all of them today. The record can also mark an image as one we photographed ourselves, or as an illustration generated rather than photographed. Neither kind is on a published listing as this is written. If one ever is, its alt text will say which it is in both languages, so a screen reader and a search engine are told the same thing a reader is.

Why that is ordinary in this trade is worth a sentence, though it is an explanation and not a defence. A factory shoots its goods once, and the file then travels with the goods: to its agents, to the marketplaces, to every company that resells the item. The same photograph ends up on dozens of listings of the same product, because it is a photograph of that product and the factory that made it wanted it seen. That is the practice we have joined. It does not tell you who owns the copyright in the file, and neither did the listing we found it on.

So we keep a record of every one, written before the image is ever attached to a listing: the address the file came from, the address of the page it was on, the time we fetched it, and a SHA-256 hash of the file exactly as it arrived, taken before we re-encode it. That record is not for us. It is what makes a complaint answerable instead of a shrug — it lets us tell you precisely which file we hold, where we got it and when; it lets us find every listing carrying that image and remove all of them in one operation rather than by searching; and it survives the removal, because the proof that we took something down is the part you need afterwards.

Two checks run before any such photograph is published, and both of them are machine work. The first strips the EXIF metadata, which removes the coordinates of the place the picture was taken and the photographer of record — a privacy control, and one we would run whatever the copyright position was. The second reads the picture: text recognition across the whole image, looking for what is printed inside it. Anything carrying a way of reaching whoever published the original listing — a Skype handle, a WhatsApp or telephone number, an e-mail address, the address of a marketplace storefront — is refused outright, and refused here means refused: the database itself rejects any attempt to attach such a file to a listing, whoever makes it. Twenty-six photographs were refused on exactly that ground in the clearance of 6 August 2026. The reading notices things it does not refuse as well — a company name, a certification mark, a third-party brand — and those are recorded against the image rather than acted on, because a factory's own name on a factory's own photograph of its own goods is not a reason to reject the picture. Every reading is stored against the image with the date it was done, and it is what a complaint about a photograph gets answered from.

What we no longer claim is that a person looks at each one. A named member of our staff signs off the batch, and that name and that date are recorded against every image in it — a real signature with real accountability behind it, but not the same thing as somebody examining every photograph by eye, which is what this page used to say. The correction is deliberate, and it is the call this page already makes about licences: an undertaking that is weaker but accurate is worth more than a stronger one nobody could stand behind. Neither the reading nor the sign-off can tell us who owns the copyright in a photograph, and this page does not pretend that either of them can — the reading answers a narrower question, about what is printed inside the picture, and the copyright question is answered by the removal route below.

Three things we are not claiming, so that nobody has to guess. We do not claim the copyright in a photograph we did not take. We do not claim a licence we cannot produce. And we do not claim the hosting shelter that would make all of this somebody else's problem — the section above gives it away under both laws and it stays given away, because the servers are still in Singapore and none of that reasoning has changed. We are the publisher. We chose the image, and we put it on the page.

Which leaves the remedy, and it is a practice rather than an argument. If a photograph on this site is yours, write to the address at the foot of this page, give us the page and say which image. It comes down within two working days, and we do not ask you to prove the right first — no registration number, no lawyer, no form of words, no evidence. That is a deliberately lower bar than the one for taking down a whole listing further down this page, and the reason is that the two are not the same risk: a listing removal can be used to hurt a competitor, and an image removal cannot. An image can be replaced, and a photograph wrongly removed costs a buyer nothing.

Two things that route does not do, and they matter to both sides. It settles nothing: taking an image down is not an admission that the right is yours or that we infringed it — it is us declining to argue about a picture — and nothing in it waives, limits or delays any claim you have. And it reaches only the image. The copy, the specification table and the translations on the same page are our own work, so a complaint about those goes through the full notice procedure set out below.

What this covers, and where the right has to exist

Four kinds of right, and they do not run on the same law. Copyright exists the moment a work is made and needs no registration anywhere — a product photograph, a manual, a drawing, a spec sheet, firmware, a user interface. Trade marks, registered designs and patents are granted by an office in a particular country, and the grant is the whole of the right.

Which makes territory the question most complainants forget to answer. A design registered in Germany is not a design registered in China, and a mark registered in the United States gives its owner nothing against a listing aimed at a buyer in Brazil. We list goods made in China to buyers all over the world, so "this is our design" is not yet a notice — it becomes one when you tell us which register it sits on and which country that register covers.

We act on a right that subsists in China, in Singapore, or in a market a listing is plainly aimed at. Where a right exists only somewhere else, tell us anyway. It usually changes what we do next even when it does not oblige us to remove anything, because we would rather warn a buyer before a mould is cut than after.

Trade marks, compatibility claims and certification marks

A catalogue is trade mark use, and both laws that reach us say so in almost the same words. Article 48 of China's Trademark Law defines use of a trade mark as putting it on goods, packaging or transaction documents, or using it in advertising, exhibitions and other commercial activities to identify the source of goods — a catalogue is squarely inside that, and Article 57 makes using a mark identical or similar to a registered one on the same or similar goods without permission an infringement. Singapore's Trade Marks Act 1998, section 27(4)(d), gets there by naming the thing directly: a person uses a sign if they use it on a catalogue or a price list in any medium, and a price list in any medium is exactly what this site is. So when a third party's mark appears in one of our listings, we are the one using it, under either law. There is no host-versus-publisher distinction available to us, and we do not go looking for one. Nor is there any statutory takedown or restoration regime for trade marks in Singapore at all — the Act contains no equivalent of the copyright machinery. Everything below on the trade mark side is our own process, and its legal purchase comes from section 27(5)(b) and from Article 57.

Which is why our own rule on compatibility is narrow. Chinese law arrives at the limit from two directions rather than one codified sentence: Article 59 of the Trademark Law denies a proprietor the right to stop honest descriptive use of a generic name, model number or a description of a product's function or purpose, and the courts have long treated referential use — naming a brand because it is the only way to say what a part fits — as outside infringement where it is necessary and causes no confusion as to source. That is judicial practice rather than a codified article, and we say so rather than dressing it up as one. Article 7 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, as revised in 2025 and in force since 15 October 2025, draws the outer edge: conduct that leads people to mistake goods for someone else's is unlawful however it is worded. (It was Article 6 before that revision; the numbering moved, the rule did not.) Section 28(1)(c) of Singapore's Trade Marks Act codifies the same idea — a sign may be used to indicate the intended purpose of goods, in particular as accessories or spare parts, provided the use accords with honest practices in industrial or commercial matters. We write "works with" in plain text where it is true and testable. We do not use another company's logo, typeface, colourway or packaging styling to say it, because at that point it stops describing and starts implying authorisation.

Genuine goods are a separate question, and the two laws are not symmetrical here — which is worth knowing before you write to us about a parallel import. Chinese trade mark law has no express exhaustion provision at all: the Patent Law codifies exhaustion in Article 75(1), the Trademark Law codifies nothing equivalent, and the courts decide it case by case, generally leaving a genuine unaltered import alone where the source is not misrepresented. So we do not tell you Chinese law settles this; it does not. Singapore does settle it. Under section 29(1) a Singapore trade mark is not infringed by goods put on the market anywhere in the world by the proprietor or with its consent — Singapore applies international exhaustion, so a genuine parallel import is lawful here in a way it would not be inside the EU. Two things sit outside that. Section 29(2) takes the protection away where the condition of the goods has been changed or impaired after they were put on the market and the use has caused dilution unfairly. And it never helped a counterfeit, which was put on the market with nobody's consent. Nor does any of it touch CE, FCC, UKCA, Qi, USB-IF or MFi marks: those say a body tested this product, and a test report for a different configuration of a product is not certification for that product.

Photographs, drawings and spec sheets

On a product catalogue the commonest real complaint is not a fake logo, it is a photograph — and on this catalogue it is the likeliest complaint of all, for the reason set out above. If your complaint is simply that the photograph is yours, use the two-working-day route in that section: it needs no evidence at all, and none of what follows applies to it. The rest of this is for when you want more than removal — to be told where we got the file and when, to have it matched against the record we keep, or to make a claim about a drawing or a specification sheet as well. For that, send the original file with its metadata intact, or the raw, or the invoice for the shoot. That one attachment settles most image claims in an afternoon.

For our own images the law is less generous than people assume. The default in section 133 of the Copyright Act 2021 is that the author owns the work. Section 134 moves that to the employer for a work made by an employee in the course of employment, which covers what our own staff shoot and write. Section 135 no longer helps with commissioned work: it applies only to commissions agreed before 21 November 2021, so for anything agreed on or after that date, paying for a photograph does not transfer the copyright and the photographer keeps it unless there is a written assignment. Where we cannot show that assignment, the image is not ours to publish either.

The same goes for written material. A specification table lifted out of your datasheet, a manual, an exploded drawing, a packaging layout — all of it is capable of being a copyright work, and none of it needs a registration before you can complain about it.

Registered designs and patents

These are the two we are least able to spot and the two that cost the most when they land. A design registration protects the appearance of a product — a housing shape, a grille pattern, a bevel. A patent or utility model protects how something works. Neither is printed on the product, and neither shows up in a photograph.

So we ask for more in a design or patent notice than in any other kind. Send the registration drawings, or the granted claims together with a claim-by-claim comparison against the listed product saying which feature of ours you say reads onto which element of yours. The Supreme People's Court's guidance on e-commerce intellectual property cases (法发〔2020〕32号) treats that comparison as the mark of a serious patent notice. That guidance directs courts hearing platform cases and does not bind us, but the drafting is right: the comparison is the difference between a notice we can decide in ten working days and a notice we cannot assess at all.

Where to send it, and what we do with your details

Intellectual property notices go to the address at the foot of this page — by email, or by post to the same registered office. Send the notice as plain text in the body of the email with the evidence attached: a scanned letterhead is slower for both of us, because nobody can copy a URL out of an image. A notice sent through the enquiry form gets moved across by hand, which costs you a day.

深圳市水润天成实业有限公司 (Shenzhen Sunning Tension Industrial Co., Ltd.) publishes yourchinapartner.com and is the party you are writing to. It is a company registered in the People's Republic of China, and it is the same company that operates the manufacturing side in Shenzhen, so a notice reaches the people who talk to factories without being forwarded anywhere. There is no second company to serve. The site and the mail do run on infrastructure in Singapore — hosting from Vercel Inc. and Google Cloud — but those are vendors running hardware, not a party you can write to about a listing. Your notice and its attachments are read by our staff in mainland China. Serve it on the Chinese company. It is the publisher, and it is the party by which a decision about a listing is made. We have not appointed a designated representative under section 318(2)(c) of Singapore's Copyright Act 2021. Doing so would mean naming an individual, publishing a Singapore address and a telephone number for them and filing the appointment with IPOS, and it belongs to a safe harbour we do not claim.

There is one further recipient, and you should know about it before you write rather than afterwards. Within two working days of our acting on a notice we send the notice itself to the factory that makes the product — the text, the attachments and who sent it — because nobody can answer an accusation they cannot see. That factory is a separate business in mainland China, so this is a disclosure of your details outside our own staff, and for a complainant in Europe or in mainland China it is a further transfer out of the country you wrote from. If a particular contact detail should not travel, say so in the notice and we will hold it back and act as the channel instead. How the factory's reply then works is set out below, under the factory's right of reply.

We keep the notice, your identity and authority documents, the evidence and our decision, as the record of what we did and why. That is all it is used for; there is no marketing list on this site to add you to. Our policy is to hold that file for six years from the date of our decision — long enough to cover the period in which a claim about the decision could still be brought — and to delete it when the period runs out. Article 19 of the Personal Information Protection Law is the duty behind that: a handler must keep personal information no longer than the shortest period necessary to achieve the purpose of handling, which makes a retention period something we have to be able to justify rather than something we get to default to. Section 25 of Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act 2012 says the same thing from the other side and reaches the copy that sits on the Singapore infrastructure. The rest of how we handle personal data, including the section dealing with intellectual property notices specifically, is on our privacy page.

What we do when a notice arrives, and how fast

One thing before the timetable, because it saves most people the rest of this section: if all you want is a photograph taken off this site, you do not need a notice. Say which page and which image, and it comes down within two working days with no evidence required — the section on where the product photographs come from explains why we set the bar there. What follows is the procedure for everything else, and for a complainant who wants a decision rather than a removal.

We acknowledge a complete notice within two working days, Beijing time, with a reference you can quote. Working days are days on which our Shenzhen office is open, which matters most around Chinese New Year. We decide within ten working days of the notice being complete — and where the answer turns on a document only the factory holds, that tenth day is when we tell you exactly where it stands and what we are still waiting for, rather than when the matter ends. If a piece of the notice is missing we tell you which piece, and the clock stops until it arrives. An incomplete notice is not refused, it is paused.

Where a notice is clearly well founded we take the listing down first and investigate afterwards, usually the same working day. There is a legal reason for that and not just a courteous one, and both laws that reach us arrive at it from opposite directions. Article 1197 of the Civil Code makes a provider that knew or ought to have known and did nothing jointly liable with the infringer, and your notice is the moment we know. Section 27(5)(b) of Singapore's Trade Marks Act 1998 runs the other way and lands in the same place: it deems us not to be using a sign only for so long as we neither know nor have reason to believe the proprietor did not consent, and your notice ends that too. We cannot un-know a notice, so for a registered mark on the face of a listing the safe course is to remove and reinstate, not to leave it up while we read.

On copyright the reasoning is shorter, and it runs against us rather than for us. The provisions about when a provider may be treated as authorising an infringement exist to sort out the liability of someone who supplied a facility for material that somebody else put there. We supplied no facility. We chose the product, wrote the copy and published it, so where a listing infringes we are a primary infringer rather than an authoriser, and knowledge is not an element of primary infringement — at most it bears on what a court would award, not on whether the act was infringing. A notice therefore does not create our exposure and never knowing would not have avoided it. That makes the case for taking a listing down first stronger here than it would be on a platform, not weaker.

Four things make us act at once, whatever stage the assessment has reached: a court order or an injunction; proceedings already on foot over the same product; a judicial, administrative or customs investigation, including a seizure; or a request from a competent authority. In those cases the listing comes down on sight and the reasoning follows.

Where it is not clear-cut, the listing usually stays up while we put the allegation to the factory that makes the product and ask for the licence, the registration or the provenance. You are told the outcome either way, with the reason. If we decide not to remove, we say why, and you can send us more and ask us to look again — and nothing we decide binds you.

If you are the factory named in a notice

You get a right of reply, and it is not a formality. Because we wrote the listing, the first thing under review is our own work — our copy, our specification table, and, where the photograph came off a public listing rather than out of a camera of ours, our decision to publish it. Then, within two working days of acting on a notice, we send you the notice itself, including who sent it, because nobody can answer an accusation they cannot see. If a complainant has a specific reason a piece of their contact detail should not travel, they can say so in the notice and we will hold it back and act as the channel instead.

You then have ten working days to answer with evidence: a licence or distribution authority, your own registration, proof your design predates theirs, proof the goods were put on the market by the rights owner, or the honest-practices ground for a compatibility reference. We send your answer to the complainant, who has ten working days from the day it reaches them to tell us they have begun proceedings or filed with a competent authority. If they do not, the listing goes back up. If they do, it stays down until the dispute is resolved or withdrawn.

Those two windows are ours, not the law's, and we say so because both of the laws people quote say something different. Article 1196 of China's Civil Code gives the accused party this right of reply but sets only a "reasonable period", with no number attached; the fifteen days people cite come from Article 43 of the E-Commerce Law, which binds platform operators — a description that fits us the day a member factory sells here in its own name, so we treat the fifteen days as a ceiling on ours rather than as somebody else's number. Singapore's own restoration timetable — six weeks to file a restoration notice, a ten-working-day standstill after it, then restoration inside the following ten to fourteen working days — sits in section 322 of the Copyright Act 2021 and regulation 79 of the Copyright Regulations 2021, and it belongs to a provider relying on sections 316 to 319. We are not one. We picked ten working days because it is long enough to get a certificate out of a factory in Bao'an and short enough that a wrong removal does not sit there for a month.

What happens to a factory that infringes

The listing comes down. Everything else we list from the same factory in that product family comes down with it while we go through it, because a factory that supplied one infringing item has rarely supplied only one. We have no supplier accounts to suspend, so the consequence lands where it actually matters to a factory: on the listings, and on whether we keep sourcing from them.

If the factory knew — it supplied a counterfeit, it copied a design it had already been warned about, or it gave us a photograph that was not its to give — it comes out of the book entirely. Two upheld notices against the same factory in twelve months takes its whole catalogue down for a full review. Three, and it is removed. The same ladder is written into the supplier terms, where it forms part of the factory's own contract with us, and the twelve months runs from the date of each decision.

A removed factory loses the Verified mark along with everything else, and it cannot buy it back, because Verified was never for sale here at any tier. A Diamond or Gold fee buys placement, and at Diamond it also buys publication of the factory's registered name. It does not buy a second chance, and it is not refunded when a factory is removed for knowing infringement.

A certificate is part of this ladder too, because a factory can now put one in front of a buyer here. Where a certification body's mark has been forged onto a document we display, that body has the same route as any other rights owner, and the consequence sits at the top of the ladder rather than the bottom: supplying a false or forged certificate ends the listing on the first instance, with no cure period, exactly as the supplier terms already say. We do not establish that a certificate is genuine as a matter of course — and every one we display says on its face whether we have — and that is precisely why a notice from the body that issued it is worth acting on quickly.

A notice sent to knock out a competitor

Start with the law that reaches us. Article 42 of China's E-Commerce Law makes a notifier liable for the loss an erroneous notice causes, and doubles the damages where the error was malicious. That article is addressed to platform operators. We are not one yet and we will be, so rather than treat it as somebody else's rule we apply it now — and it is the standard and it is the one a Chinese court would recognise. Where a factory we list loses orders to a notice we can see was sent in bad faith, our whole file — the notice, the evidence, the dates — goes to that factory. A complainant whose notices keep failing on reply will be told we need a court order or a ruling from a competent authority before we act on the next one.

The Singapore provision people copy into notices does not reach us, and you should know that before you rely on it. Section 324 of Singapore's Copyright Act 2021 does make it an offence, punishable by a fine of up to S$10,000 or up to two years' imprisonment or both, to make a statement you know to be false on a point material to a takedown notice, and it makes the maker liable in damages to anyone who suffers reasonably foreseeable loss. But on the Act's own words that section attaches to a take-down or restoration notice served under sections 317 to 322 on a provider relying on the safe harbour, and we are not such a provider. A notice you send us is not one of those notices. So we will not tell you that writing to us puts you at risk of a criminal conviction, because it does not. It is the standard we hold a notice to anyway.

What binds you is shorter and more ordinary. In the notice you warrant that what you say is accurate and complete and that you are entitled to say it, and you indemnify us for the loss our acting on it causes — that undertaking is set out in the requirements at the end of this page, you give it to us directly, and it depends on no statute at all. Behind it sits the general law. A false statement made maliciously about a trader's goods, causing loss, is malicious falsehood; a statement made knowing it is untrue and intended to be acted on is deceit. Neither of those needs a safe harbour to work, and a company that acted on your notice and took a listing down is the party that suffered the loss.

The rule cuts at us too, under both laws. Article 12 of China's Anti-Unfair Competition Law, as revised in 2025, prohibits fabricating or spreading — or procuring another to fabricate or spread — false or misleading information that damages another operator's commercial reputation or the reputation of its goods — which is what a bad-faith accusation is, whoever sends it. In Singapore a person aggrieved by a groundless threat of trade mark or copyright proceedings can sue for a declaration, an injunction and damages under section 35 of the Trade Marks Act 1998 and section 499 of the Copyright Act 2021, and it makes no difference whether the person making the threat owns the right. Both Acts draw the line in the same place: telling someone a right exists is notification, telling them you will sue them is a threat. So our own letters to people copying our listings state what the right is and what we say it covers. They do not threaten proceedings we have not decided to bring.

Before you commission a custom product

Read this before you send us a drawing. We do not clear your design for you. We will tell you if we recognise a problem, but recognising a registered design is not something anyone does by eye, and a mould cut for a shape that turns out to be registered is a total loss.

A search of the design and patent registers in the markets you intend to sell into costs a small fraction of a steel tool. Search every one of those markets, not only China: a Chinese factory can lawfully make something you cannot lawfully import, and the customs seizure happens at your end, not theirs.

If you send us a competitor's product and ask us to have it copied, we will say no, and we will tell you why rather than quietly stop replying. If you tell us the design is yours, or that you are licensed for it, we take you at your word and proceed on that basis — which means it is your statement, and you are the one standing behind it.

Which language version governs

This page exists in English and in Chinese, and the Chinese is written rather than machine-translated. Where the two could be read differently, the English text governs. That rule is the opposite of the one on the supplier terms, and the difference is deliberate: every listed factory is in China, so those terms resolve in Chinese, while an intellectual-property notice reaches us across a border and in practice arrives in English. The address we publish for service is in Shenzhen either way, and nothing here makes English a condition of sending a notice — write in whichever language you have, and we will act on it.

What this page is not

It is not legal advice. We run a marketplace; we are not a law firm, and nothing here substitutes for someone qualified in the market that matters to you. Where a right is worth money, that advice is worth money too.

It is not a determination of anyone's rights. We are not a court and we do not decide who owns what: removing a listing is not a finding that your right is valid or infringed, and leaving one up is not a finding that it is not. What we are not saying is that we are a neutral venue — we chose the factory and we wrote the listing, so a complaint about this catalogue is a complaint about our own work and we answer it as the publisher. Nothing here waives, limits or replaces any remedy you have, and your right to go to a court or a competent authority does not depend on whether you write to us first.

We update this page when the process changes. The version in force is the one published here, with the date at the top.

Where to serve a notice

Article 1195 of China's Civil Code gives a rights holder the right to serve a notice on a network service provider, and a right to serve is worth nothing without somewhere to serve it — so this address is published even though we claim no safe harbour that would make publishing it a condition of anything.