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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.
Five bucks says Amazon won't compensate the seller for the loss of revenue. But you better believe that if one of Amazon's suppliers did this to Amazon, there'd be lawsuits galore.
There needs to be an ip / DMCA / trade marks / etc review with fines payed out for BS link this or just can only be taken down by court order.
sue for fraud 800K + legal fees seems about right.
I want to know why Amazon just passed this along without vetting the law firm out? Doesn't anyone do something as simple as making a phone call, checking if the law firm is even licensed? All this is easy enough to obtain. Especially when your being ask to revoke a customers product.
amazon will pay or do hard time this may be at least in part an criminal case.
1) The person who created the fake web site/law firm/etc. and perpetrated the fraud.
2) Amazon, since they did not do due diligence and ensure that the complaint was legit. And if there original fraudster (see 1) cannot be found, that even makes Amazon's due diligence look even worse.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Turn the case over to the (state) licensing authority with jurisdiction. Practicing law without a license. Possible criminal penalties.
Have gnu, will travel.
Amazon did not do reasonable due diligence and was the party tricked by the fraud, they should be the one to pay a penalty.
This on top of fraud complaints made against whoever did the fraud in the first part.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Cocksuckers!
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
It looks like the person(s) who filed the complaint created a fake law firm site using info stolen from a real law firm's site. It wasn't good enough to pass a 5 minute sniff test, but apparently was good enough to pass Amazon's 1-click non-test. Likely the person(s) filed the fake complaint (and set up the fake website) using an anonymous email account.
The onus in these cases has to be on Amazon to expend the resources to properly vet these claims before acting on them. If there were viable competition between marketplaces, this wouldn't be a problem. Sellers would abandon the flaky/lazy marketplace and move to ones which treated them better. But Amazon dominates online sales, much like eBay dominates online auctions.
This is the whole reason we revolted against walled garden online services (AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, MSN) in the 1990s in favor of the open Internet. Having a handful of companies acting as gatekeepers just presents too much opportunity for abuse. When Amazon first started, I was hoping multiple online retailers like it would blossom and we'd rely on price search engines (like Pricegrabber) to invite competition between all online retailers. Unfortunately that hasn't really happened, and if anything the public seems to be gravitating back towards the walled gardens (iOS iTunes, Google Play on Android).
>Anonymous Coward
>I guess what we really need is a non-anonymous internet
gud1
FC Closer
You really think they don't have a "we can stop selling your product for any reason we want whenever we want without notice" clause in whatever their contract with market place sellers is?
>No one knows who filed this claim - all the identities cited are faked or stolen.
No-one knows yet. The identities are fraudulent but the motives are not. Someone did this to hurt them, not just play rough and tumble capitalism. I'd start by asking the owners a few questions:
1) Do you have any particularly disgruntled ex-employees?
2) Is there a competitor who has been particularly aggressive?
3) Did anyone on the executive get divorced recently?
This probably was not done by someone on the other side of the Earth who never heard of the product. It was done by someone who knew them and wanted them hit when they were vulnerable. That's going to be a very short list.
I'd imagine that Amazon's fraud department has a bunch of interns data mining to see if they can't help narrow that list even further because right now they need to demonstrate good will. You can also bet that the defamed law firm will not be letting this slide.
Of course, proving this in court may be another matter but it may never need to get to that. The suspect may go bankrupt in pretrial.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Instead of a fine, which is difficult to collect in the case of a fictitious entity, what about requiring a bond?
We already see bonds being used in legal disputes over intellectual property. For instance, if Apple sues Samsung and asks the court for an injunction against the sale of Samsung products, Apple will be forced to put up a bond. If it later turns out that Samsung was in the right all along, that bond will be used to compensate Samsung for the sales lost during the injunction.
Given that a DMCA takedown acts as an injunction, why not require that anyone filing a DMCA takedown request provide proof that they are bonded? If it later turns out that they perjured themselves, filed a false claim, or otherwise abused the system, the victim of the takedown notice won't have to hunt down the abuser to receive compensation. Instead, they can simply go to the surety company to collect their compensation, just like you would with a bonded contractor.
This also has the benefit of slowing down or at least discouraging any given company's ability to abuse the system. After all, if they maintain the minimum bond allowed and it was just paid out to a victim, they won't be able to use it to secure a future takedown notice until they pay it back, effectively preventing them from filing any more takedown notices. And if they keep a bond for more than the minimum, they'll potentially be out quite a bit of money if they start abusing the system.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get around the biggest problem with this idea: if the minimum bond is too large, say, $100K, normal people wouldn't be able to protect their work since they couldn't afford the minimum bond, while if the minimum bond was too small, say, $10, it wouldn't be useful in the least in compensating victims for their loss. Maybe there's a way around it, but I haven't figured out a way to make it both fair to big companies and Joe Schmoes while still discouraging abusers in the few minutes it took to type this comment.
You've obviously never tried to get any cop to help you with any property crime.
They will give you a police report, for your insurance. That's all. You can have 'them' on video, the cops won't care. With the narrow exceptions of perps that have already pissed the cops off or perps who are cops (the second is 'danger Will Robinson' for you). If the video is good enough perhaps the local news will use it to get some ratings. You're on your own.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sue John Doe and the firm that hired him. Also make police reports to various agencies.
They used a Godaddy account and Microsoft hosting. You think there isn't a money trail or a log of connections to the host? Some two-bit fraudster thought this was a good idea. You've got a pretty good chance that they made mistakes.
Real lawyers write in C++
Brushes4Less looses out big time, so who wins ? Did some other toothbrush manufacturer sell more stuff as a result ? Following the money might be a good way of finding who ultimately was responsible — assuming that it was not just some random act of vandalism.
Amazon is best placed to see where sales went, it will be interesting to see if they can be bothered.
...which I specifically mentioned as a problem that I didn't know how to get around.
In order to sue Amazon for anything worthwhile, you'd have to be able to persuade a court that your losses were significant. To do that, you'd have to build up a reasonable business base to begin with.
At that point, "torpedoing your own business" becomes a significantly less attractive proposition.
Of course, if you've done your sums and figured out that your business is actually making a loss... this might be a way out. But it's a hard slog to get to that point, and even harder to realize and admit it to yourself when you do.
And thus the end of the human race came not with a roar, nor applause, nor whining, nor crying, nor even silence, but with the air heavy with apathy.
That could work. Right now, service providers like YouTube have to "expeditiously" remove infringing content if they want to maintain their safe harbor status that keeps them from being held liable for that content. But if we removed that requirement for takedowns that aren't bonded, it'd give hosts a means to vet the claims that are more likely to be abusive, while also incentivizing the big players to play nice.
This would work in a world where the laws were being made to actually protect folks instead of better the interest of those paying for the laws.
But we don't live there.