Slashdot Mirror
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.
Then Amazon would be liable when they make a sale. Knew and facilitated anyways.
As the summary notes, there's no way Amazon can police the system adequately with the way it currently functions. At best, it can hope to dissuade some counterfeiters through threat of litigation.
However, to my mind, the real problem is Amazon's lack of transparency when it comes to evaluating and purchasing products from 3rd-party sellers. Amazon will just default to a lower priced listing from some random company, and unless you're paying attention, you could end up purchasing from someone else. There should be a much stronger "flag" that goes up before you can do this -- otherwise, Amazon risks getting sued for liability when people think they're purchasing stuff "from Amazon" but they get defective crap from somewhere else.
But one further issue -- what about linking product reviews (particularly for "verified purchases") to SELLER? If I'm going to be purchasing a product X from company Y rather than Amazon, I should be able to -- in some easy fashion -- just get reviews of X from Y.
I'm sure we've all seen reviews on Amazon that say, "I purchased batteries from [this company], and they're fake!" It should be transparent to find such reviews. So even if the product X has 1000 reviews with an average of 4.5 stars, if the 20 reviews from company Y say, "Beware -- this thing is a piece of junk, not as advertised!" a customer has a chance of making a more informed decision.
(Obviously, lots of reviews on Amazon are fake anyway, and there's all sorts of problems there too. But this would at least be something a customer could try before just blindly purchasing a product from some random 3rd-party company.)
IANAL, but what basis does Amazon have to be suing these counterfeiters?
They aren't the trademark holders. From Amazon's point of view, all they did was violate the TOS.
Shouldn't Amazon just spot them, shut them down and pass along any relevant information to law enforcement and the trademark holders and let THEM handle it? I don't think Amazon wants to be in the position where they have to play trademark police. We saw how well that worked out with the DMCA...
Yeah, I pretty clearly see that Amazon is headed down the dark road where Alibaba's always been. Amazon *used to* be a platform you could trust, at least most of the time. But now? With all these direct-from-China sellers on it? These people are sharks and they know every trick in the book.
A lot of them really don't know how to make money other than shenanigans. The idea that they should offer an honest product and run a good business, get a reputation, etc.? Foreign ideas. The counterfeiter idea is that the only way to win is to rip people off, and when they get burned and don't buy from you again, well don't worry there are billions more people out here and you don't need repeat business. A lot of these scammers operate on razor thin or zero margins, and they go bankrupt all the time. I really don't think it was a good idea for Amazon to open up to them.
What Amazon should do is go to Alibaba and hire away some of their anti-fraud department. Start playing whack-a-mole. It's just not going to get better any time soon. The winners are going to be the counterfeiters, and the losers are going to be Amazon honest sellers. It's a real tragedy.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
They won't be sincere because in Asian culture it is considered an honor to be copied. To create something so unique and desirable that 1000 people try to re-create your perfection is the pinnacle.
And when people try to re-create a product and ultimately fail in doing so, resulting in harm or death to others, is that also considered an "honor"?
I really wish they would stop the practice of combining a bunch of sellers for a given product. It makes the reviews even less worthwhile because you don't know if a couple of bad sellers pushing fakes are tied to the bad reviews, nor do you know who the legitimate sellers associated with the good reviews.
I have heard several people I know say that there are whole categories of product that they never buy from Amazon due to the number of fakes. They were specifically talking about hair products but it also applies to many other things. At some point people will lose faith in the platform as a whole and stop using it (ie don't bother it's all knocks offs anyway).