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Amazon Was Tricked By a Fake Law Firm Into Removing a Popular Product, Costing the Seller $200,000 (cnbc.com)
Eugene Kim, reporting for CNBC: Shortly before Amazon Prime Day in July, the owner of the Brushes4Less store on Amazon's marketplace received a suspension notice for his best-selling product, a toothbrush head replacement. The email that landed in his inbox said the product was being delisted from the site because of an intellectual property violation. In order to resolve the matter and get the product reinstated, the owner would have to contact the law firm that filed the complaint. But there was one problem: the firm didn't exist. Brushes4Less was given the contact information for an entity named Wesley & McCain in Pittsburgh. The website wesleymccain.com has profiles for five lawyers. A Google image search shows that all five actually work for the law firm Brydon, Swearengen & England in Jefferson City, Missouri. The phone number for Wesley & McCain doesn't work while the address belongs to a firm in Pittsburgh called Robb Leonard Mulvihill. The person who supposedly filed the complaint is not registered to practice law in Pennsylvania. One section on Wesley & McCain's site stole language from the website of the Colby Law Office. The owner of Brushes4Less agreed to tell his story to CNBC but asked that we not use his name out of concern for his privacy. As far as he can tell, and based on what CNBC could confirm, Amazon was duped into shutting down the seller's key product days before the site's busiest shopping event ever.
The onus in these cases should be on Amazon to expend the resources to properly vet these claims before acting on them.
FTFY, but the problem is that the DMCA doesn't work that way (though I wish it did).
In fact, it's been structured to incentivize Amazon to NOT expend any resources at all, since doing so may open them up to legal liability. Under the terms of the DMCA, service providers like Amazon enjoy a limited immunity against being held liable for copyright infringement on their service that took place at the direction of their users. In order to maintain their safe harbor status, service providers are required to act "expeditiously" to remove allegedly infringing content in response to a takedown notice. I.e. The DMCA presumes the recipient of a takedown notice is guilty and is structured such that it places the burden of proof nearly entirely on them.
Vetting the claim has the potential to open Amazon up to liability for their users' misdeeds, since either taking too long to vet or outright denying the claim would mean that they failed to act expeditiously. Google has given up their safe harbor status on a few occasions to defend users who were CLEARLY in the right, but that sort of thing is the exception, not the rule, and no service provider can currently be reasonably expected to do otherwise in all cases.