Amazon knows all about of the garbage being sold on its site but only does something about it if you're a massive tech company who threatens to sue, very cool.
my question is why hasn't the FBI seized every Amazon warehouse for knowingly selling counterfeit goods? They do this routinely for smaller businesses selling fake stuff
Because they don't "knowingly sell counterfeit goods". Amazon employees don't create these listings, other people do.
Someone that "knowingly sells counterfeit goods" is humanly aware that a specific item they are selling is counterfeit, and decide to sell it anyway, which is not the case here.
These listings are taken down whack-a-mole style as Amazon is made humanly aware of their existence.
Does Amazon do literally anything to pro-actively prevent the selling of counterfeit goods?
> Prior to the deal, Apple sent “hundreds of thousands of take-down notices” to Amazon to reduce counterfeits, and the company conducted test purchases on Amazon that “consistently returned high counterfeit rates
It has become increasingly difficult to operate as a 3rd party seller on their platform. A lot of categories and items are "gated" requiring a lot of additional approval or limited access that's difficult to come by.
For example, there are books I purchased off of Amazon, directly from Amazon as new books, that I am not allowed to sell as used on their site. This wasn't always the case.
They have anti-counterfeit teams, brand protection programs, etc. They say their brand protection is about 99% effective at blocking counterfeits. But, they have something like 350+ million listings, so there's still tons of stuff that makes it through the cracks.
Fraudulent listings aren't specifically an Amazon problem, there's junk like the above example on basically every marketplace site. Search "2tb flash drive" on any of them. It's a fundamental problem with non-curated marketplaces.
AFAIK, trademark law does not require explicit knowledge, if you sell an item with a trademark and just don't care whether it came from the mark owner then you're still infringing if it didn't.
So, all those dodgy USB drives that are branded are infringing.
In the UK these are "counterfeit" and illegal to sell (not just tortuous, criminal).
I'm surprised if the USA code doesn't make these actions criminal and leaves them only as civil matters given how much the state choose to consider copyright as a criminal action?
I mean, if I had repeated instances of someone else performing illegal activities in my basement, I can't continually, or even once, claim that I had no idea. Amazon knows it has counterfeit problems and does nothing to curb it. In fact, they encourage it. Just because it's hidden behind several layers of software abstraction does not mean that Amazon doesn't have explicit knowledge. These products even physically sit in their own warehouses.
Knowing about the existence of crime in a general sense is not legally or functionally the same as knowing about or being directly involved with a specific instance of crime.
> I mean, if I had repeated instances of someone else performing illegal activities in my basement, I can't continually, or even once, claim that I had no idea.
Amazon does not claim that they are unaware of counterfeit products on their platform. They do explicitly say they are aware of fraudulent products on their platform, and they have blogs on their website that talk about this.
> Just because it's hidden behind several layers of software abstraction does not mean that Amazon doesn't have explicit knowledge.
They are generally aware that marketplace sellers list fraudulent products. They are not specifically aware that any particular new listing is fraudulent until after the fact.
> These products even physically sit in their own warehouses.
Sometimes they do, but not all of the time. However, putting the item in a warehouse does nothing to authenticate it.
Fwiw, in the UK it didn't matter if you know goods are counterfeit or not, if they are trademark infringing then they get seized.
Things are not working if consumers don't know what they're buying and government departments devoted to enforcing correct information in the market are doing nothing about it.
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.
> my question is why hasn't the FBI seized every Amazon warehouse for knowingly selling counterfeit goods?
What government would kill the goose that lays golden eggs? They pay tax. Buyers pay tax. Huge amount (but not that much as I expected [0]). What else is needed?
What little taxes they pay state/locally are next to nothing because of sweetheart deals in exchange for locating warehouses and offices in particular areas...deals which mean they likely pay less tax than the costs they incur on the communities in terms of services and infrastructure.
I've wondered why it's allowed as well. I assume via salami-slicing/frog-boiling. We let it get worse little by little because everyone was winning now it feels too big to police.
The world makes a lot more sense when you realize the government is basically a gang. The majority of law enforcement/military action falls into a few buckets:
1) Farming the tax cattle (ex: speeding tickets)
2) Tracking down and punishing “foxes in the hen house” who disrupt their tax cattle (ex: a murderer easily destroys $1M in taxes per tax cow killed, gotta stop that)
3) Turf wars vs other gangs who would usurp their role as farmer
Probably because seizing the entire warehouse is an awful and unjust idea.
First, Amazon's warehouse hold merchandise from other companies. Why should they be punished because Amazon or a different company is selling counterfeit goods.
Second, do the retailers know they are selling counterfeit products? There is a huge difference between intentionally deceiving people and getting hoodwinked by thieves. For example, if Amazon's employees decided to buy counterfeit and promote them, that would be wrong. However, what happens if an Amazon employee is tricked and thinks they are buying legitimate goods but are really buying fake goods. In the later case, Amazon is a victim of fraud and should not be punished.
Finally, punishments should be proportional to the crime. If I cause $5 worth of damage, I should not pay a $10,000 fine. Note I have noticed a lot of online posters push for draconian punishments and that is not just or helpful.
Technically speaking, those 2tb flash drives are fraudulent, but not counterfeit. (which generally refers to misrepresentation in brand origin)
Also, the word "knowingly" requires the person taking action to have the knowledge in their head. Someone else knowing it isn't enough to qualify.
Amazon's listings are not curated. Amazon knows nothing about fraudulent listings until later brought to their attention. These fake flash drives exist for short period of time until they are brought to Amazon's attention, at which point, they are taken down.
They control the listings, they receive and hold the merchandise, they ship it, they deliver it, they take payment, they handle customer complaints, ...
What's the point where we are going to say "it's not good enough to point at the 3rd party with the autogenerated name" and "computers at large"?
Amazon makes money from those garbage companies having an ad war over who gets to deceive the eyeballs of Amazon's customers first, and then takes a cut when it gets sold.
Customer Obsession and Earns Trust might be two of Amazon's Leadership Principles, but no principles stand in the way of cold hard cash.
I agree with you about Amazon's leadership principals. It's clear that the retail side of Amazon regularly ignores them.
My favorite example of this was I was browsing the "top 50" computer science books on Amazon. This was about 10 years ago. In the top 50, they had basic how to books (like how to use Linux or Excel), books on getting coding jobs, etc. They had almost no actual computer science books and yet, the top 50 list software almost certainly created by people with a computer science degrees!! The list even listed the same title more than once in a few cases. It was obvious that the software which built the list was broken and either had not been tested or was deployed in a known broken state. Customer obsession does not mean shipping obviously broken software which does not help the customer.
As for trust, when I canceled Prime, Amazon used dark patterns to make the process as painful as possible. Not much to say other than I do not trust companies which try to trick me into not canceling a subscription I do not want.
Honest question: why would you trust any public company? Do they have any motive to do anything in your interest that isn't somehow calculated to benefit them monetarily in the maximum way possible?
First one I clicked into, Amazon’s own AI generated review summary says “…it takes days to transfer anything, and has only 64 GB of usable space. Customers also dislike the data.”
People in my world goggle at me when I say I don’t shop on Amazon, but whenever I do go on there I couldn’t be happier not to be paying for the privilege of combing through all of that garbage. (Amazon Visa rewards card holder since 2007 and had Prime 2010-2019)
Yeah, Trek2000 didn't really defend their mark too much. I suppose J&J probably does because I don't see anyone using Bandaid for non-J&J bandages, at least in the US.