Near
At last week’s Big Tech Congress hearing, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos called counterfeits a “flag” that harms consumers and “honest third sellers” on the platform.
His testimony came when Amazon put more effort into combating this scourge and holding not-so-honest third-party distributors accountable, adding an advanced seller verification program and a counterfeiting unit. He has also recently partnered with two prestigious brands, the healthcare, protection and goods conglomerate for the 3M customer and the designer Valentino, in lawsuits against distributors. (In reaction to a query on the 3M lawsuit, an Amazon spokesperson said the platform had demonstrated a “clear and consistent position against abusive pricing and counterfeiting”).
We’ve already noticed these demands: since 2018, Amazon has partnered with at least 3 brands from every five cases. And while those brands seem happy with the outcome, the cases, which in many tactics reflect ongoing demands, attendance illustrates how complicated it is to hold Amazon dealers accountable, even with the help of Amazon.
Take, for example, designer Vera Bradley, who partnered with Amazon on 3 lawsuits against counterfeit merchants in 2018. In one case, Amazon.com and Vera Bradley Designs Inc. v. Linda Kurth, court documents show that the plaintiffs were convicted. of a default sentence because the defendant never answered.
Court documents also show that the 3 instances resulted in precautionary measures, preventing defendants from promoting the brand’s products and/or promoting them on Amazon. But the court cases also included John Does 1-10 as spaces reserved for any other party and, in some cases, even the named defendants are unclear. In Amazon.com and Vera Bradley Designs Inc. v. Wei “Tony” Jiang and others, the complaint includes 18 of those defendants with descriptions such as “Defendant Wei ‘Tony’ Jiang, d/b/a ‘Tony Springs’, is an individual who lives in Texas or is an ‘a/k/a’ or an adjustment ego for one or more of the other well-known defendants in that lawsuit.”
In addition, on April 19, 2019, the case was settled and closed, but court documents show that mail sent to Jiang was returned without being opened. And it’s unclear how brands or even Amazon can prevent a hard-to-find reseller from reappearing on the platform under a different name. Amazon didn’t respond. Daren Garcia, a spouse on the eControl team of the vorys law firm, speculated that there might be a way to prevent distributors from using the identifiers of merchants they use on the platform, but stated that he had no internal knowledge.
Julia Bentley, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications with Workers at Vera Bradley, said whether the court order prevented defendants from promoting Vera Bradley products or promoting on Amazon, or whether Amazon had paid the trademark’s legal fees.
“Since [2018], we’ve noticed relief in counterfeit sales activity on the Amazon platform,” he wrote in an email.
John Does 1-10 was also included in the 2018 case of the Otter Products electronic accessories logo.
“Lawyers will bring Doe parts up to lawsuits as necessarily reserved spaces,” Garcia said. “What they’re saying is, ‘We think there may be other bad actors, but we don’t know or are unsure of their identity and we’ll use the discovery procedure to locate what data is part and then amend our complaint.” to bring it up.’
According to Kevin McPherson, senior director of logo coverage at Otter Products, Amazon approached the logo because it got rid of classified ads similar to those of a major distributor of counterfeit products. He said Amazon’s recommendation to sue, and presented the legal prices to canopy and hand over all the recanoated cash.
Otter Products knew where the main defendant was based on data about the Amazon seller, and McPherson said he learned about John Does’s lifestyle through the case’s location procedure. On February 28, 2019, defendants accepted a court order and about a month later, the lawsuit was dismissed.
McPherson said he was satisfied with the result and appreciated Amazon, adding, “Getting so far as to take legal action with us carries a lot of weight as a deterrent.”
Now, he has also stated that counterfeiting and unauthorized merchants are a minor problem, calling it “shame.”
“It’s a couple, one or two a week, like the crowd we once had,” McPherson added.
However, he admitted that the decline may also be due to surveillance of Otter Products, and said Amazon could do more to make brands eliminate bad players smoothly.
Meanwhile, in mid-2018, the accessories, hardware and lighting logo for cell phones, Nite Ize, began testing the acquisition of suspected counterfeit products based on an “unusually high number of low-priced gifts and poor visitor reviews.” Legal director Clint Todd said the logo traced classified ads to a distributor in Canada and then decided that the dealer had shipped nearly 300,000 products to Amazon distribution centers.
“Once we understood the scope of the problem, we contacted Amazon and showed up to take over the case, pay the long-term legal fees, and provide Nite Ize with all the damage recovered,” Todd said.
Like other cases, Nite Ize is not 100 percent transparent about the seller’s identity. But in this case, Amazon doesn’t seem to know either.
Todd claimed that Amazon had a name, charge, and bank account for defendants indexed in the complaint, but that he did not know who they were or where they were now, and that they had not responded to the trial. On January 16, 2020, the court legalized the expedited discovery to help locate the defendant and Todd is confident that if Nite Ize can access the bank account and PSI information, he will identify them.
“I hope we can hold them accountable in some way for their actions, yet, as things stand, all we can do is close their Amazon stores,” he said. “I don’t know if they opened under other names or anything else.”
Lawyers say those lawsuits are a positive step for Amazon, brands and consumers. However, so far, they have only helped a small number of brands. And brands that can’t use Amazon-funded lawyers may have difficulty completing their own cases.
“It’s hard, those kinds of stories about brands that don’t have the money, time or resources to fight those fights are wasting a percentage of the market and they’re being driven out of business,” Todd said.
In the end, Sucharita Kodali, vice president and senior analyst at the Forrester research firm, said it was much less difficult for Amazon to deal with those ad hoc issues, because the platform would limit in a different way what it allows on the site, and said Amazon doesn’t need to do that.
“They have … billions of articles about it and if even some of them … possibly questionable otherwise, why would Amazon have to lose that if no one complains?” she added.
He referred to a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, as the New York Times said, “allows Internet corporations to moderate their sites to be legally higher for everything they host.”
“Basically, the challenge is that Amazon doesn’t have to do anything because it’s a market and the markets are through Article 230,” Kodali said. “Amazon can do whatever it wants.”
In an email, an Amazon spokesperson said, “This may not be an exception to the truth. Counterfeiting damages our brand, alters the integrity of our store and demands situations that we accept as true ones with which we have worked hard to win customers.” that Amazon’s Z-to-Z ensures that it covers the charge for returns, refunds and other disorders similar to the sale of counterfeit products “when a bad actor does not pay”.
Instead, Kodali said the government revoked Section 230 so that Amazon can be responsible for customer coverage and abusive pricing like other retailers.
“There is no law that holds Amazon accountable for anything from false reviews to counterfeit products and value increases, because it’s the distributors who are guilty if they decide to sue the brand, so 3M is suing a seller, not Amazon.” Kodali added.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to come with an Amazon story.