The US Supreme Court on Monday weighed in on another case watched by the tech industry, rejecting Tiffany & Co's appeal in its drawn-out trademark infringement suit against online auction site eBay. The company has long maintained that eBay was responsible for preventing auctions of counterfeit Tiffany jewelry and other items, but federal and appellate judges disagreed. The Supreme Court justices upheld those earlier decisions.

Tiffany originally sued eBay in 2004 when it discovered that most of the auctions for "Tiffany" items were counterfeit. It accused eBay of not being proactive enough about preventing auctions of counterfeit items, and that it was responsible for trademark infringement by allowing users to list items using the Tiffany name.

Judge Richard J. Sullivan disagreed, noting that eBay employs hundreds of people to identify and remove auctions for counterfeit items. eBay also reasonably responded to takedown requests from Tiffany. Judge Sullivan maintained that further policing of counterfeit auction items was the responsibility of Tiffany & Co itself.

The US Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the earlier decision in April of this year. "It is true that eBay did not itself sell counterfeit Tiffany goods; only the fraudulent vendors did, and that is in part why we conclude that eBay did not infringe Tiffany's mark," the court wrote in its opinion.

Tiffany took its complaint to the Supreme Court, suggesting that the case dealt with important questions about the burden of maintaining trademarks in Internet age. The company complained that eBay knew that the majority of auctions of Tiffany-marked goods were fakes and did little to stop it. eBay maintained that if trademark law needed to be changed specifically for Internet commerce, then that responsibility fell on Congress.

The Supreme Court rejected the appeal without offering a specific opinion.

While this case generally supports the legal principle that website operators are not directly responsible for users' actions on that site in the US, courts in the EU have been less consistent on the matter. A French court granted Louis Vuitton a large settlement against eBay for similar complaints in 2008, while a Belgian court sided with eBay in another similar complaint by L'Oréal later that year.