Amazon sues sellers over fake takedown requests against competitors

E-commerce giant Amazon has filed three lawsuits against bad actors that pretended to be legitimate copyright owners in an attempt to remove products from the Amazon Store.

Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) filed lawsuits against multiple groups that submitted thousands of false copyright infringement claims against Amazon's selling partners in an effort to have those sellers and their products removed from the Amazon store.

"We know how important it is to our selling partners to have a consistent Amazon store experience, and we will be unrelenting in our pursuit of bad actors that attempt to undermine that experience," said Kebharu Smith, director of Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit.

"These lawsuits should serve as a warning to anyone that uses fraud in an attempt to harm any of the millions of selling partners that work with Amazon every day," Smith added.

The lawsuits were filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Amazon said it is working to provide selling partners the tools they need to help protect their intellectual property rights, and a key tool in that effort is the Amazon Brand Registry.

Launched in 2017, the Amazon Brand Registry is a free service that provides brands a suite of tools for protecting and building their brand.

"With Brand Registry, automated protections scan over 8 billion daily attempts to update listings to proactively prevent infringing listings from going live before a customer ever even sees them," said Amazon.

Since the launch of Brand Registry, said Amazon, there has been a 99 per cent reduction in reports of suspected infringement by enrolled brands.

"These are just a few of the many reasons why over 700,000 brands are currently enrolled, and that number continues to grow," the company added.

--IANS

na/sha