Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) reports having filed three lawsuits in relation to false copyright infringement claims filed against legitimate selling partners.
The lawsuits filed at the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington relate to thousands of copyright infringement claims filed in bad faith to try to have products listed by Amazon's legitimate selling partners removed from the platform. Amazon states that these false claims "attempted to reduce customer choice, harm Amazon's selling partners, and damage the integrity of Amazon's store".
Amazon's press release claims that the defendants in these cases "created fake, disposable websites, with product images scraped from the Amazon store, to use as false evidence when making thousands of claims that selling partners were violating their copyrights". It has also been reported that one of the defendants engaged a China-based company to file trade marks in the US and used a terminated application to gain access to the Amazon Brand Registry, following which they filed around 3850 bad faith complaints against products listed legitimately on Amazon by verified selling partners.
Amazon often files joint lawsuits with brand owners against the sellers of counterfeit goods (as discussed in my previous article here) but this is the first time that they have taken legal action against bad faith actors who fraudulently use the Brand Registry and IP infringement reporting mechanism to attack brand...
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