Amazon Sues Chinese Knock-off Site & Influencer
Amazon (AMZN) and Cartier (CFR.SIX) have filed a suit against both a company selling items on Amazon and an influencer who helped to promote the products, for selling jewelry and accessories that illegally carried the Cartier trademark. The suit, filed in the US District Court of the Western District of Washington, alleges that a Chinese entity known as YFXF (Amazon Selling Account name) and a number of ‘John Does’ sold counterfeit products on the Amazon site that bore the Cartier logo, without any license from owner. In 2017 Amazon opened the Amazon Brand Registry, a free service to any right’s owner that has a government-registered trademark (even those without an Amazon relationship) that uses machine learning to allow brands to search and report potentially infringing products using image-search software. With more than 700,000 brands in the program Amazon states that those brands are finding and reporting 99% fewer suspected infringements than before joining.
Amazon also employs a system by which every brand in a second service known as Transparency, applies a 2D code to every product they manufacturer, which allows the company, customers, and law enforcement to identify the authenticity of any enrolled branded product. By the end of 2021 23,000 brands were participating which covered 750m product units, and an additional service, known as Project Zero, allows enrollees to directly take down counterfeit products on Amazon stores. Amazon and Cartier have verified that the items were counterfeit and therefore violate the terms of the selling agreement that was signed by YFXF. The suit asks the court to require that the defendants provide an accounting for all amounts due to Cartier and pay such fees including damages, attorney fees, and interest. Unfortunately, the owner of the Chinese entity known as YFXF has not been named in the suit, along with 10 unnamed defendants, who were involved with or worked for the offending company, all of whom are living in China, which might make it difficult to gain access to the company records, but we have to give Amazon credit for trying, even though we know it was to prove to Cartier that it takes its legitimate sellers seriously.
Amazon also employs a system by which every brand in a second service known as Transparency, applies a 2D code to every product they manufacturer, which allows the company, customers, and law enforcement to identify the authenticity of any enrolled branded product. By the end of 2021 23,000 brands were participating which covered 750m product units, and an additional service, known as Project Zero, allows enrollees to directly take down counterfeit products on Amazon stores. Amazon and Cartier have verified that the items were counterfeit and therefore violate the terms of the selling agreement that was signed by YFXF. The suit asks the court to require that the defendants provide an accounting for all amounts due to Cartier and pay such fees including damages, attorney fees, and interest. Unfortunately, the owner of the Chinese entity known as YFXF has not been named in the suit, along with 10 unnamed defendants, who were involved with or worked for the offending company, all of whom are living in China, which might make it difficult to gain access to the company records, but we have to give Amazon credit for trying, even though we know it was to prove to Cartier that it takes its legitimate sellers seriously.
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