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Amazon Takes Counterfeit Sellers To Court For First Time (cnbc.com)
For the first time, Amazon is taking counterfeit sellers to court. The move comes after several sellers expressed strong concerns about their businesses getting ripped off by Amazon, which is not doing anything to curb distribution of fake, poor quality products on its ecommerce platform. Notably, even Apple had said recently that a lot of its accessories listed on Amazon are fake products. From a CNBC report: On Monday, Amazon filed suit against a group of sellers for infringing on athletic training equipment developed by TRX. In a second case, Amazon sued sellers who are offering fake versions of a patented moving product called Forearm Forklift. [...] There's no way Amazon can litigate away the problem. The company generates over $75 billion a year in commerce, and about half the volume now comes from third-party sellers. However, with Amazon showing its willingness to take abusers to court, the company can at least hope to deter counterfeit sellers with the threat of potential legal action.
And Amazon also combines the products in their warehouses if the third party seller uses Amazon for shipping. So you might purchase from Amazon LLC, but get the fake product from the third party seller.
I was adding a battery to my boat meant to be easily removable and bought a set of Anderson PowerPole DC connectors off Amazon. They were terrible knockoffs that wouldn't create a reliable circuit when properly assembled. It's not hard to see counterfeits from this category causing a fire.
There's maybe a large class of products where counterfeiting may not matter, but outright counterfeiting of legitimate brand named products ought not to be tolerated.