Amazon has had enough of fraudulent sellers.
The popular e-commerce platform recently filed lawsuits against multiple groups it claims were abusing its takedown system to have their competitors removed from the Amazon store.
Amazon calls the lawsuits it issued "a new offensive against bad actors" targeting its selling partners.
Amazon DMCA Takedown Request Abuse Details
Amazon mentioned in the statement it released that its Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) failed lawsuits against multiple bad actors that submitted numerous false copyright infringement claims against its seller partners to remove them and their products from its store.
The company further claimed that the claims they falsely made were an attempt to reduce consumer choice, harm Amazon's selling partners, and damage the integrity of its stores.
The Verge noted that the lawsuits Amazon filed mentioned that they didn't just file fake complaints and sat back to wait for it to blow over. They also created "fake, disposable websites, with product images scraped from the Amazon store" and tried to use them as evidence that they were the legitimate copyright holders.
Interestingly, the company accuses one defendant under the name "Sidesk" of escalating the situation: they used a "fraudulent" trademark application to get into the Amazon Brand Registry Program, which lets companies search for and manage scans of fraudulent listings that copy their products. Amazon claims that the US Patent and Trademark Office canceled the trademark application, but Sidest used it anyway.
Allegedly, a company called Shenzhen Huanyee Intellectual Property Co. Ltd. filed Sidesk's trademark application, leading to the Patent and Trademark Office sanctioning it for "filing over 15,800 trademark applications using false, fictitious, or fraudulent domicile information and/or credentials."
Amazon stated that it quickly protected customers and selling partners while also shutting down the accounts of these bad actors when it detected the attempted abuse. It then filed a lawsuit against these bad actors to take things to a new level to hold them accountable for their fraudulent actions.
Kebharu Smith, director of Amazon's CCU, said that Amazon and the members of its CCU know how important it is to its selling partners to have a consistent experience and that the CCU will be unrelenting in its pursuit of bad actors that attempt to undermine that experience.
Rampant DMCA Takedown Request Abuse Details
Although Amazon's systems for dealing with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests have legitimate uses, some sellers would use such a system to do what the previously mentioned bad actors did to gain more buyers.
The same is true in video-sharing platforms like YouTube, which have a history of receiving DMCA takedown requests from scammers to either extort a creator or take their ad revenue without any real consequences.
However, Amazon claims it has various protections in place to detect and stop bad actors from attempting to submit fake and abusive infringement notices to deter them from doing just that.
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