(Yicai) July 26 -- Chinese e-commerce merchants are increasingly plagued with lawsuits filed by owners of useless trademarks abroad.

In the past two years, the number of temporary restraining orders that Chinese exporters have received has risen, Wang Han, a senior partner at Hui Ye Law Firm in Shanghai, told Yicai.

Chinese sellers in the United States are very likely to be exposed to infringement lawsuits because American laws and rules on intellectual property protection and e-commerce platforms' guidelines prioritize buyers' experience over that of sellers, Wang added.

Regular small or medium-sized merchants in China cannot afford to hire a lawyer in the US so they have to settle and pay the plaintiff considerable sums of money to avoid bigger charges, the legal expert added.

One merchant who opened a store on a cross-border e-commerce platform said to Yicai that the company received a pre-trial temporary injunction because a trademark troll had sued the firm in the US, claiming that a certain product available online infringed on a trademark. As a result, the merchant's overseas bank account, which has a balance exceeding USD50,000, was frozen. This is the second TRO the merchant received in less than a year.

US courts tend to quickly issue TROs upon plaintiffs' request and the defendant will suffer from restrictions such as frozen assets until the trial. All options are costly as dismissing a TRO would mean giving up on all frozen funds and closing up shop.

The merchant said that it is easy to find several similar cases when talking with other professionals or looking up online. Some American law firms even disguise themselves as big buyers to ask about Chinese sellers' products to use that information as evidence, the vendor added.

For example, a Beijing-based exporter of sports shoes received a TRO from a US court late last year. The plaintiff said that the exporter had violated a trademark so the court froze the defendant's account with a balance of USD44,000.

"I was a lawyer myself and I knew I could prove ourselves innocent," said Xia Di, the head of the shoe exporter. "But this is a multinational lawsuit and responding means it is necessary to hire an expensive US lawyer." In this situation, even if we won the lawsuit, most of the unfrozen funds would quite likely be paid to the lawyer."

The exporter decided to settle and transferred over USD20,000 to the plaintiff, equaling half of the unfrozen funds.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Emmi Laine