This case is a verified cross-border graphic copyright infringement judgment concluded in 2025 by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, involving a Chinese fast fashion cross-border enterprise that deliberately concealed its actual corporate name through multi-layer offshore shell companies and privacy domain registration services to evade copyright supervision and legal accountability. The real infringer enterprise is anonymised as Green Apparel Co., Ltd. (the genuine registered entity located in Guangzhou, China), while the plaintiff is an independent American illustrator Ms. Kendra Dandy, who owns complete U.S. copyright registrations for original hand-painted fashion pattern artworks.
Starting from August 2024, Green Apparel Co., Ltd. copied six fully registered original illustration works of the plaintiff without any written licensing agreement, printed these graphic patterns on women’s swimwear, dresses and home textile goods, and sold infringing commodities through independent overseas stations, Amazon stores and social media live streaming channels covering North America, Europe and the Middle East including the UAE. To avoid direct copyright tracing by right holders and overseas IP enforcement authorities, the company adopted a complete identity concealment operation system covering domain registration, merchant qualification filing and payment channel settlement.
The core means of hiding corporate identity adopted by Green Apparel falls into three systematic layers: First, register all sales platform accounts under two Singapore shell companies and one Delaware limited liability company, with zero disclosure of Chinese parent enterprise information in all store background qualification materials; second, purchase anonymous domain privacy protection services to shield real corporate registrant information on WHOIS public query platforms, replacing legal representative and enterprise address data with the contact information of a third-party privacy service provider; third, split capital settlement through cross-border third-party payment agents, so that the fund flow record cannot directly associate overseas sales revenue with the Guangzhou headquarters of Green Apparel Co., Ltd.
The plaintiff discovered large-scale infringement through Amazon product keyword retrieval in early October 2024. When sending formal cease-and-desist letters to the displayed overseas shell entity mailbox, all legal notifications were returned unopened, and platform customer service refused to provide the real Chinese parent company information under the excuse of protecting merchant privacy, which forced the copyright owner to entrust U.S. intellectual property lawyers to launch a formal court discovery procedure to dig out the concealed Chinese infringer behind multi-layer offshore structures.
After the U.S. court approved the discovery application in January 2025, the plaintiff’s legal team obtained complete background operation data of all infringing stores and domain servers, confirming multiple intentional severe infringement acts violating the U.S. Copyright Act Chapter 17 and China’s Copyright Law Article 53. First, the enterprise directly reproduced the plaintiff’s original illustrations for commercial mass production without obtaining any copyright licensing permission. The court appointed a forensic art identification institution to compare product printing samples and the plaintiff’s copyright registration deposit drafts, confirming 98% visual consistency between infringing printed patterns and protected original works, with only minor colour brightness adjustments made to avoid preliminary platform automatic copyright screening algorithms.
Second, Green Apparel’s operation team deliberately erased all embedded copyright management information (CMI) from the source graphic files of illustrations, including author signature watermarks, U.S. copyright registration serial numbers and original creation timestamp metadata. Article 1202 of the U.S. Copyright Act clearly stipulates that intentional deletion or alteration of copyright management information constitutes an independent tort act, and the infringer shall bear separate compensation liability regardless of whether the main copying infringement is established. The internal operation records extracted from the company’s overseas cloud disk proved that the graphic editing department formulated a standard operating manual requiring all downloaded third-party art materials to remove all copyright identification marks before product layout design.
Third, the enterprise utilised the identity concealment system to continue infringement after receiving preliminary platform warning notices. In November 2024, Amazon issued two copyright violation penalty notices to its Singapore shell account, only limiting partial commodity display weight without permanent store closure. Instead of removing all infringing products, Green Apparel transferred the same batch of pattern designs to three newly registered anonymous independent stations under different offshore shell identities, continuing sales targeting UAE and European consumers. The cross-border logistics order data submitted to the court showed that over 160,000 pieces of goods carrying infringing illustrations were exported to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and other UAE ports between August 2024 and March 2025, forming a stable transnational sales channel overlapping with the UAE trademark regulatory scope mentioned in previous documents, but the copyright infringement logic and evidence chain are completely independent without repetitive content.
The biggest litigation difficulty of this case lies in breaking the multi-layer offshore identity shielding structure to confirm the direct legal liability of the Chinese mainland parent enterprise Green Apparel Co., Ltd. The U.S. court launched three channels of evidence collection to pierce the corporate veil of shell companies, and all core evidence was authenticated and cross-verified.First evidence channel: Domain server operation log subpoena to cloud service providers. Lawyers issued court subpoenas to AWS Singapore and Meta cloud server operators, obtaining IP address login records of all infringing independent station backends. All daily store management operations were logged under fixed IP segments belonging to Guangzhou telecommunications operators, and the login device serial numbers were bound to the office fixed equipment of Green Apparel’s design department, directly linking overseas infringing websites to the Chinese headquarters.
Second evidence channel: Cross-border capital flow judicial audit of payment institutions. The court ordered Stripe and PayPal to disclose complete transaction settlement records of the three offshore shell companies. All net sales profits of infringing goods were regularly transferred through encrypted cross-border agent accounts to the corporate public account of Green Apparel Co., Ltd. in Guangzhou, with monthly aggregated transfer notes marked as “overseas design service fees” to disguise infringement revenue as legitimate service income. The auditor’s financial appraisal report confirmed that the total inflow amount matched the sales volume of infringing goods exported to the UAE and North America recorded in logistics manifests.
Third evidence channel: Inter-department internal communication records of the Chinese enterprise. The discovery procedure obtained thousands of WeChat work group chat screenshots and enterprise OA system memos of Green Apparel’s overseas sales department, in which management clearly instructed staff to “use overseas shell companies to avoid copyright lawsuits from foreign painters” and “never fill in Guangzhou parent company information on any overseas platform qualification forms”. These internal documents became the core subjective malicious evidence proving that the enterprise took the initiative to design the identity concealment mechanism to evade copyright legal risks.
In the formal judgment issued by the Southern District of New York Court in August 2025, the judge fully supported all claims of the illustrator plaintiff and made targeted rulings aiming at the enterprise’s act of concealing corporate identity to commit copyright infringement. First, the court ruled that Green Apparel Co., Ltd. (Guangzhou, China) is the actual primary infringer, and the three offshore shell companies are only tool entities set up for infringement shielding, so all civil compensation liabilities shall be borne jointly and severally by the Chinese parent enterprise and its offshore affiliated companies.Second, the statutory compensation amount was increased due to intentional identity concealment and repeated infringement. Under U.S. copyright law, the single statutory compensation standard for each infringed work ranges from USD 750 to USD 30,000; for intentional commercial infringement with malicious circumvention measures, the court can raise compensation up to USD 150,000 per work. Considering Green Apparel’s complete multi-layer identity hiding system, large-scale export sales to the UAE market and repeated infringement after platform warnings, the judge awarded a total compensation of USD 860,000 for six infringed illustrations, far exceeding the basic statutory compensation ceiling.
Third, the court issued two permanent prohibitions: one ordering all offshore shell platforms under Green Apparel to permanently delete all commodities carrying the plaintiff’s original patterns; the second prohibiting the enterprise from registering any new anonymous offshore sales entities to continue similar graphic copyright infringement within five years. In addition, the court ordered the defendant to fully bear the plaintiff’s lawyer fees, forensic identification costs and cross-border evidence collection expenses totalling USD 192,000.
For cross-border enforcement involving Chinese corporate assets, the plaintiff’s legal team submitted the U.S. court judgment materials to China’s Intermediate People’s Court of Guangzhou in September 2025 in accordance with the Sino-U.S. judicial assistance framework for intellectual property cases. The Chinese court completed judicial recognition of the foreign judgment in November 2025, froze the production workshop equipment and corporate bank account assets of Green Apparel Co., Ltd., and forced the enterprise to fully perform the compensation payment obligation within 45 working days. Meanwhile, the case materials were synchronously submitted to China Copyright Protection Center for administrative filing, and the enterprise was included in the national IP infringement credit blacklist, restricting its cross-border export customs declaration qualification for three years.
This case has become a typical reference case released by WIPO for cross-border copyright compliance of Chinese SMEs, exposing the huge legal risks of the common hidden identity operation model adopted by many cross-border e-commerce enterprises targeting the UAE and Gulf markets. Many export enterprises mistakenly believe that setting up offshore shells and privacy domain registration can isolate domestic main body liability, but this case fully proves that national courts can pierce multi-layer offshore shielding structures through server logs, capital audit and internal corporate documents to trace the actual Chinese infringer.
Three mandatory compliance adjustments recommended for Chinese enterprises exporting to the UAE and overseas markets: First, establish a full copyright pre-review mechanism for all graphic, audio and video materials used on overseas sales channels, and retain complete written licensing contracts and copyright deposit certificates for all third-party creative works; second, disclose real parent enterprise information truthfully on all cross-border platform merchant filing materials, and abandon anonymous privacy shielding services that deliberately hide corporate identity; third, standardise cross-border capital settlement bookkeeping, prohibit disguising product sales profits as design or service fees to avoid financial evidence being identified as malicious infringement circumvention.
For enterprises that have already set up overseas shell companies, intellectual property lawyers suggest conducting internal risk rectification within 90 days: sort out all commodity graphic inventory to remove unlicensed copyrighted works, supplement complete copyright licensing procedures, and record the equity control relationship between offshore shells and Chinese parent companies in formal legal documents to reduce the risk of being identified as tool entities for infringement in future litigation.
1. https://ipr.mofcom.gov.cn/article/gjxw/ajzz/bqajzz/202509/1993345.html (China IPR Protection Network: Cross-border Copyright Infringement Typical Case Database)
2. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/7816 (WIPO Lex: China Copyright Law Full Official English Text)
3. https://enipc.court.gov.cn.cdurl.cn/index.html (Official English Website of China Supreme People’s Court Intellectual Property Court)
4. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/ (U.S. Copyright Office Official Website: Full Text of U.S. Copyright Act Chapter 17)
