Lovense wants the industry to know it is done tolerating knockoffs. The sex-tech device maker used a late-July announcement to publicize an intensified global intellectual-property enforcement campaign, and the framing is as notable as the action. The company is casting counterfeit crackdowns as a fair-competition problem for the whole sector rather than a fight over its own sales.
That positioning matters because few companies in adult tech operate at the scale needed to run sustained multinational IP litigation. Lovense is a hardware maker, which makes it a rare target for physical counterfeiting and a rare player with the resources to pursue it across borders.
What the company said it is doing
The announcement describes legal proceedings against the unauthorized use of Lovense’s proprietary technology and designs. According to the company, some US distributors have voluntarily halted sales of infringing products and entered compliance agreements, and Lovense says it intends to pursue all appropriate legal channels to defend its rights globally, signaling a push beyond the United States.
CEO Dan Liu tied the campaign to something larger than the balance sheet. “Every act of IP enforcement is not just about defending one company,” he said. “It is about upholding transparency, integrity, and the consumer experience across the entire industry.”
The context, and the caveat
This release sits on a longer track record. Trade and legal-industry coverage reports that Lovense and its parent, Hytto, have pursued IP litigation against more than 250 alleged infringers since 2022, with a cumulative recovery around $20 million and a separate $3.6 million judgment against a Shenzhen-based counterfeit seller. Those figures are background rather than part of this week’s news, and the July announcement itself named no defendants, disclosed no dollar figures, and cited no case numbers.
That absence is the honest caveat. The release is PR-framed, kept general on purpose, so read it as a statement of posture rather than a filing. Still, the posture is the point. For consumer sex-tech hardware, counterfeits are a genuine safety and trust problem, since a fake device made to no standard ends up on a customer’s body. A company willing to spend on enforcement, and to talk about it as an industry duty, is trying to make legitimacy a selling point in a category where buyers have few ways to tell the real thing from a copy.
