They sell illegal goods. Yes, I'd say they're doing something illegal. Now the illegal goods happen to be supplied by other people without Amazon's knowledge, but Amazon is still the one selling them, and they have a duty to know what they're selling. And once they know that some of their suppliers are selling them illegal goods, they have a responsibility to do everything they can to stop that and prevent it from ever happening again. Instead, they choose to describe it as not a big problem.
IANAL, but I am not sure if they're legally selling counterfeits, or if they're even (legally speaking) involved with any crime at all. Maybe (to the law) they're victims as well? Common sense tells me: Yeah, what Amazon is doing should be considered criminal activity. But common sense and laws sometimes tend to disagree.
Anyhow, I think generally we agree: Amazon should be punished for this. If the legal framework does not allow for this, it needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Nothing surprising in this. People are using an automated online marketplace to sell illegal goods. Online marketplace takes down products when they are reported.
It's a game of whack-a-mole and Amazon is doing the bare minimum. The company has no incentive to do otherwise.
It is borderline criminal. If they were not such a large organisation they would be charged with facilitation. They are knowingly allowing the sale of counterfeit goods.
You go down to a street corner and sell knock-off Prada bags and you will be arrested. You let someone sell counterfeit goods from your store and you are an accessory.
This will only change when Amazon are held accountable.
Just because counterfeit goods are sold doesn’t mean you have to sell them too.
With all of these stories about Amazon it’s clear they care more about volume of goods sold and therefore amount of revenue generated and market share than they do about what is being sold.
If two journalists and a few days can turn up this many clearly banned items that Amazon’s searches themselves are suggesting, it clearly is not something that the company hasn’t been aware of since the start of third party selling. They just choose not to commit resources to it as they’re facing no serious repercussions for it and it actually makes them money.
Since this is nominally a site that discusses technology and Amazon is itself a major vendor of internet services it is not out of the question to think that they could, with programmers assigned to it and a desire to do so, massively reduce the ability for dangerous and/or banned items being sold on their site. Given that many of these things come from the same sellers and are being purchased by the same people it’s not as if these are all one off outliers. It’s a hard problem, certainly, but this is a company led by the richest man in the world for crying out loud!
If ever there was a reason for state oversight to stop large tech entities from getting away with whatever they want, surely it’s enabling people to actually cause deaths?
It is borderline criminal. If they were not such a large organisation they would be charged with facilitation. They are knowingly allowing the sale of counterfeit goods.
You go down to a street corner and sell knock-off Prada bags and you will be arrested. You let someone sell counterfeit goods from your store and you are an accessory.
This will only change when Amazon are held accountable.
I guess it all depends on how interested someone is in the specific problem. The war on drugs makes a mule an accomplice. The war on piracy makes a hosting platform an accomplice. Particularly when they are aware of the issue and don't act.
Since Amazon would clearly act if their own products or brands were impacted it stands to reason that not only are they complicit in committing that crime and providing assistance but also that they abuse their position to selectively enforce rules.
Of course there's no incentive to do anything to change this particularly in lobby driven parts of the world where the benefit of the company is paramount. After all the company is the one filling the pockets of legislators and judges.
No one said those things are illegal to possess or sell.
They're saying Amazon prohibits their sale, but doesn't effectively enforce that rule.
> They’re included among 38 pages of third-party seller rules and prohibitions for its U.S. marketplace.
> Yet an investigation by The Markup found that Amazon fails to properly enforce that list, allowing third-party sellers to put up and sell banned items.
Amazon invented a new category of business for itself. It claims it is not a store or a retailer, or even a distributor in the conventional sense of the word.
If it were any of those things, it would be liable for safety issues of the products it sells, among other things.
I suspect “other things” includes “knowingly operating a cartel that violates patent and copyright law on a larger scale than any other organization in the western hemisphere; primarily by importing illegal and unsafe counterfeit goods into the US”.
I have no idea why the courts have gone along with this scheme. My guess is that it’s corruption.
They also allow illegal infringement on sellers. I knew a family that ran an Amazon import business and they bought an entire batch of surplus tennis shoes directly from a company in the primary supply chain of the shoe company. All on the up and up. The shoe company filed a complaint with Amazon that they were not authorized to sell their shoes and Amazon closed down the related listings. That was a serious restraint of trade and Amazon could likely be sued to the moon but they just moved on. I really wish they would have pursued the lawsuit against Amazon.
Isn't it more about whether it is illegal rather than whether it is done in bad-trust?
If you worked for Amazon, I suspect you would push very close to the line of legality in order to maximise profits, which makes you look dirty but doesn't necessarily get you in court.
The problem for me, perhaps like many, is that there are just too many things that I can easily find on Amazon that are much harder to find elsewhere. I don't believe they are particularly ethical but I also don't want to spend hours looking around different sites when everything is on Amazon.
Not great examples compared to amazon considering amazon is not just renting space to the seller, but also actually sells the illegal merchandise by taking payment and shipping it.
It’s more akin to finding it on the shelf at walmart than a stall in a market, or more akin to making your payment for the illegal BnB directly to the landlord’s office.
“ Alongside its third-party marketplace, Amazon sells products to consumers directly, and The Markup found it was also selling banned items itself, revealing cracks in the largely automated purchasing system that feeds its massive product catalog.”
I think the point is that by creating a system that makes counterfeiting easy and doing nothing to stop it when they knew it was taking place (or now demanding payment to stop it), Amazon is somewhat responsible.
I do not think it is misplaced to look at a massive fence of stolen goods as a problem. Amazon takes a cut of every sale just like a fence. They have constructed their onboarding and process to "not know your customer" because they enjoy this revenue even though they must know their system is being heavily used for these illicit sales.
I don't think most of products they sell are actually legal to be sold. If you had these products in your mom and pops shop, the trading standards or whatever agency would shut down your store, but somehow Amazon is allowed to sell all this dangerous junk without consequences and they are even allowed to avoid paying tax. Something isn't right.
That's why the standard is negligence and/or recklessness. Nobody expects Amazon to catch every single illegal use of their platform: the expectation is that they apply reasonable effort to doing so, including demonstrating a response to publicly known incidents of crime rings operating on their site.
I said exactly as much in my first comment.
Edit: This is at least the second time you've minimized an important piece of context: the problem is that they're accepting stolen goods, with multiple municipalities repeatedly warning them about it. Treating that as a "scale" issue doesn't wave the crime away, any more than throughput at a meatpacking factory would be a defense for the occasional employee being caught in the slaughter line.
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