Amazon is selling stolen art, fake products and is infringing copyrights (opens in new tab)

As the article/message chain clearly shows, the author did submit an infringement report to that link. In fact, so have I.

As the author posted a screenshot of, you get an email reply after some time saying something to the effect of "We have reviewed and removed the content"

...except, nothing was removed. The infringing content is still there. The exact same thing happened to me. Same exact email.

Edit, here's my email from Amazon: https://i.imgur.com/mzXycfk.jpg -- nothing was actually removed.

A company training its staff to forward copyright complaints to the appropriate channel is trivial.

Expecting all customers of a company to be magically educated about the proper channel for copyright complaints is much less realistic imo.

A company making profit from counterfeits making counterfeit reporting unintuitive sounds a bit suspicious.

So you’re telling the people reporting things it’s /their/ fault that this activity is thriving? Amazon bears no responsibility for taking a complaint like this in /any/ channel and making an appropriate response? Come on.

This isn’t a mom and pop store. This isn’t a company that can’t figure out logistics. This is amazon. If they don’t forward these complaints to the right place of their own volition, then they aren’t working hard enough to abide by the law. Fair is fair. Corporations need some responsibility to go with all their privileges.

I am the artist who's work is sold illegally on Amazon. There is no excuse for Amazon. Absolutely none. 0! I have reported the URL. It never changed. I don't know when the ASIN changed but the URL remained the same. The new ASIN or URL cannot be reported. I am getting the message that the ASIN is wrong whenever I am trying to report it. I am getting silly answers from silly people who are bullshiting me. They have a seller who is selling fake products. What a serious company does is to close his store. Especially when they learn that an item that is take off is up again. After days of complains I decided to complain on Facebook. They are bullshiting me there as well. It's a real shame!

Aside: Thank you for all the help here! These comments are amazingly helpful. Do you have a blog or other repository of this knowledge such that we can search for it there? Though I have no issues with Amazon now, I can imagine I may have some in the future. Searching through old HN comments to try to find this data is, well, sub-optimal. Again, thank you!

Is it a joke?

Does the average customer care more about saving $10 or protecting someone's copyright? I'd argue given the how prevalent copyright infringement by people has been that they'd rather save $10. So Amazon is doing exactly what customers want which is cheap goods irrespective of everything else.

I think you are confused. The artist is not the customer.

Almost as funny as Don't be evil. Once the company becomes beholden to shareholders, all of the mottos/ethos/etc that they may have started with become null & void. Whether that's from an out right declaration, or just no longer recognizable from the slippery slope of decisions while chasing the stock price.

I believe it was really true when Amazon was a small company that needed growth by word of mouth, just like Google by not being evil. When the companies get huge, word of mouth is not the best growth tactic anymore.

sounds like a nice generic company value/principle

There is a HUGE market in China for counterfeit products. In China, even Mercedes-Benz you buy might be entirely counterfeit! Until recent years, these fake products didn't leave China to come to US shores. Now these merchants are simply creating web of LLCs and have Amazon ship it off their crap on Prime. At least dozen product categories were reported as counterfeits in various reviews like Duracells, headlamp, bulbs, USB cables, board games, GoPro like cameras, razor blades etc. I wish Amazon at least made it compulsory to disclose "Made in XYZ" in product description (isn't that a law anyway?).

I drove to REI to buy a yeti insulated cup because the ones on amazon were reported counterfeit.

They’re already losing my business.

What did Amazon do here that was wrong? It sounds like these people bought illegitimate “ghost shift” shoes from a factory and the brand owner correctly shut them down.

> All on the up and up.

Unfortunately, trademark law in most jurisdictions allows manufacturers to effectively prohibit importing and selling goods obtained cheaply overseas and reselling them in direct competition with ‘legitimate’ distributors.

This allows manufacturers to engage in price differentiation, to the detriment of consumers. As with most IP law it mainly serves to enrich those in a position to exploit it.

Yes, it may be impossible to create a filter to detect new (previously unseen) copyrighted products on the platform. However, once a copyrighted product has been through a dispute and the owner has been established by Amazon - it's completely feasible to programmatically detect and flag this product once it re-appears under other accounts. It would actually be quite easy, given Amazon's technology expertise.

From reviewing the thread the artist posted, it appears that's why he's frustrated - that fakes keep re-appearing, and Amazon is asking him to jump through hoops again, even though his authorship had been established.

So, no - I don't feel it's reasonable to ask the author to enlist people to help him police the marketplace, Amazon can easily solve this problem (future infringement) with technology.

No, all these can easily be prevented. In fact these has been prevented by brick and mortar shops fairly reliably for decades. Online sellers can impose background checks, identity verification, automatic law enforcement reporting, security deposits, delayed payments etc. One shouldn't be just able to post a product listing with intentional falsehood and omissions, sold openly to public and get away with it. That should be and is a bonafide crime. A system that allows that is helping to support and proliferate that crime.

Me, the artist tried to report them again. It's impossible. I am getting the message that the ASIN or URL is wrong. Amazon should simply shut down the seller's shop because they know that he is simply selling counterfeit products. A serious company would do this. I believe they simply chose not to. Because they compete with other unethical companies who are probably worse. I hope that we the people start realising how bad these policies are and protect ourselves.

Try this: https://imgur.com/a/L1gFAqy

The link takes you to an exchange of comments on a Facebook page that provides context for the title of this post on HN. Were you unable to view it?

I would say those posters are created by some software, definitely not that person.

Those $14k socks could be a money laundering operation as well. Happens on AirBnB, course it might be easier on there as who knows what the real price us of a one if a kind house vs a pair of socks.

At least in some cases, it's two competitors using (bad) automated pricing tools. When one auto-raises the price, the other responds, which triggers the first to raise again. Over and over. To the point where you get book listings priced over $20M. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

But yeah...you'd think Amazon would have some sort of sanity filter.

Sellers can set the prices of the things they're selling. It would be hard to have third party sellers if you didn't allow them that.

Sometimes when sellers don't want a particular Asin to sell temporarily they will raise the price to something insane instead of deactivating the listing.

I agree it does look janky.

What is the shipping experience from aliexpress like?

Did you try a chargeback?