I would think a little bit of piracy is okay with Amazon as vetting the authenticity of every seller would be too expensive and time consuming, and making it harder for a seller to get onto Amazon will only encourage the growth of competing platforms. I wonder if Amazon has a policy by which it makes payments to sellers cheated by counterfeit goods so long provided they sign an NDA about it?
If Amazon chooses to let counterfeiters etc sell on their website, why should they not be held accountable for that? Maybe they will finally show interest in what the heck they are showcasing on their own platform.
At what point is Amazon complicit in the sale of counterfeit goods from a legal standpoint? It is an obvious problem and Amazon doesn't appear to be doing much to counter it.
Seems like only a matter of time until they get sued by a brand name manufacturer just as YouTube got sued by content producers almost a decade ago. Not that I look forward to the day when Amazon sellers can be taken offline by a copyright notice like YouTube users today, but that is where we are heading.
This can be solved by requiring higher-risk merchants to put money in escrow for a while (maybe an initial amount plus some fraction of revenue). If they turn out to be selling counterfeits, amazon could use the money to set things right. Otherwise the merchant gets the money.
This is the same bullshit companies like Airbnb and Uber try to pull.
No, the people sit in the Amazon offices. If you sell stolen goods you're lucky if you aren't charged with fencing but you can bet you won't be reimbursed if those goods get claimed. If you sell fake products, you should be held accountable just the same.
Sure, pass the buck up the chain but this should never allow the consumer to be knowingly harmed by an intermediary knowingly enabling the sale of counterfeit items with no accountability.´
Amazon is knowingly allowing fraud to happen. It's a risk they're willing to take and they can get away with it because there's no legal accountability. They could try to curb it but that would impact the bottom line. The only way to fix this is regulation (i.e. laws) and more consistent application of it.
The market can't fix it because there's no market incentive to fix it.
And that's where I think Amazon open themselves up to fraud charges. They should never comingle goods under any circumstances, and they certainly shouldn't be deriving revenue from doing so.
Amazon seems to be acting as a counterfeit goods launderer.
So... I'm sure it's not as easy as I think it should be, but isn't this just a DMCA takedown notice away from getting fixed? As much as the DMCA is generally horrible and abused, this seems like an actually good use for it.
Of course, the counterfeit seller can just create a new account, and then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, but perhaps that could be grounds for a lawsuit against Amazon directly, for failing to rein in all the copyright infringement occurring on their platform. (Maybe even a class action, since this problem seems widespread.)
Again, I'm sure this isn't easy or fun (or cheap) to do, but tweeting at people to not buy your book from Amazon seems to be... not all that useful a response?
They could require all suppliers to put up a surety bond. Make the amount high enough to filter out suppliers unwilling to sell long-term and also attempt to filter out anyone intending to sell counterfeit goods. Any suppliers who hit a certain threshold of failing to meet Amazon's standards of product authenticity would forfeit their bond. This isn't a new idea, it works well in other industries.
My wife runs a small side-business and has a Seller account on Amazon. I'm a little nervous for what this might mean (assuming they don't appeal and actually do something about it) in the short term in terms of compliance costs, etc., but in the long run I think it's for the best. There is a real problem with inferior quality products and intellectual property/copyright theft from non-American sellers and aside from that the points you note are valid too: people who buy from sellers using Amazon's platform ought to have recourse--and either Amazon or the seller has to provide it when required.
So much this, but I think Amazon could still allow outside sellers through some sort of verification. I honestly often by from ebay with a high seller rating than an Amazon seller that has no transparency. Amazon needs to figure out a way to get sellers verified and rated better.
Interesting take. I'd ordinarily be suspicious of similar offloading of work.
But in this case, my impression was that each brand owner would be the most knowledgeable & motivated agent in the ecosystem to seek & deactivate the counterfeiters.
My biggest concern was that it could empower the brands to abuse the opportunity, and shut down competitors with false allegations of counterfeiting, like the fake DMCA notices for YouTube videos.
At least Amazon is saying that they'll be monitoring for this; we'll see how they do.
I also thought one of the most important items was buried in the text, a system to send special barcodes identifying product. I'm guessing it would be like a pre-authorization for shipments, so Brand X would send Amazon a database list of IDs tagged to production runs, and they'd send matching barcodes on the actual shipped product. Anything not matching the ID scheme would get rejected. Distributors could send product in with the IDs, and they'd match, counterfeiters would fail to match, even if they knew of the IDs in general. Seems good to me.
They could shut out all 3rd party sellers until they are verified. Amazon would still be making truck loads of money from Amazon basics etc. Most customers might not even notice any change when buying.
If Amazon had direct liability for selling counterfeit products, for example, if the Ove Glove company (first in the original article) could sue Amazon and recover all the revenue that went to the counterfeiters plus a penalty - I believe in this case Amazon would find a solution to ensure supplier verification.
The problem is that currently it's profitable for Amazon to host goods from fraudsters; if (when) any get discovered, they kick them off but keep the proceeds. Society and law should ensure that Amazon loses money when hosting goods from fraudsters, so that the motivation is properly aligned.
I'd mostly agree with that, with the caveat that they will often restrict particular listings or brands that got a high volume of complaints, and require proof of purchase to sell. They also flag sellers that have large sales increases in a short period of time.
>It's my view that Amazon themselves should be taking action on behalf of both consumers and sellers to ensure that: 1) products are authentic, and b) consumers can get the best prices possible even if that's from an "unauthorized reseller"
This is reasonable. They could require proof of purchase for all products, or perhaps for all products where more than 10 units are being sold.
I also think there should be a higher bar for foreign sellers, or perhaps a bond that must be posted.
The problem here is Amazon making it ridiculously easy for people outside of our legislatures reach to commit crimes. So, the logical option is to punish Amazon (and similar companies) for distribution of counterfeits.
Is it legal what Amazon is doing (or rather, not doing)? Well, make it illegal.
I don't buy it. This is why companies have (sometimes government-mandated) know-your-customer policies.
Allowing anyone to sign up and do business on your platform with minimal friction is great for growing your platform, but it's terrible for growing a trustworthy platform.
The things you bring up are the result of an allow-all policy with a denylist. Deny-all with an allowlist would fix the problem. But of course that costs a lot more to implement, and as long as people still buy stuff on Amazon despite the hassle of dealing with counterfeits, Amazon will continue to fail to fix the problem.
It sounds like there are a million deceived customers and cheated small businesses, but no individual customer or small business can take on Amazon. How about a kickstarter or other crowdfunding plan to raise money from everyone who's suffered due to Amazon's apparent tolerance of counterfeits? I.e., if you received a counterfeit product, or if your product or book was counterfeited and sold on Amazon (like the Antimicrobial Therapy handbook)?
The kickstarter plan would be to either sue Amazon as class, or sue based on the best individual cases in all available jurisdictions, or failing all of that, to lobby the government to bring Amazon under control. Assuming it got enough funding, is there any chance that the lawsuits or lobbying would work?
I think you solve it by making amazon directly liable for fraud on their platform. They’d clean up the problem pretty quickly after losing a few billion dollars in lawsuits.
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