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Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

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Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#161

Post by coryfklein »

plandis wrote: post #146
6stringmerc wrote: post #30

As a "Content Creator" and frequent advocate for U.S. Copyright Reform, this is one of the few instances where I think the full willful infringement penalty is absolutely justified. There's only a paper thin "Well they didn't inspect every book!" defense, which immediately falls apart when Amazon is making money by way of the transactions and doing market harm to the actual Copyright holder. It's not "incidental" inf…

Willful infringement? I assume you have proof that Amazon knew something was counterfeit and still sold it?

He said willful infringement was justified, not that he had an open and shut case for it already.

It's quite a stretch to assume that Amazon is unaware of the breadth of counterfeiting happening on their platform, and yet they continue to provide the platform. So on the whole, it seems they are willfully infringing.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#162

Post by [deleted] »

devnull42 wrote: post #44
lsaferite wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, then you are saying the shipper should verify every product they ship? I mean, Fulfilled by Amazon is providing a storefront and fulfillment services for things people ship to them. If you are making the argument they should verify every item they ship then that should extend to all fulfillment providers, no? Don't get me wrong, I think FBA and 3rd party sellers are a huge mistake for Amazon as a whole. I just di…

Amazon is directly selling these not acting as a third party. They are the counterfeiters in this case totally different than buying something from someone on ebay and ebay facilitating the deal.

[deleted]

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#163

Post by a3n »

blobbers wrote: post #63

Counterfeits in comingled inventory has become pretty common on Amazon these days. "Fulfillment by amazon" has led them to comingle inventories on common products, meaning every seller's product gets jumbled together. I've gotten counterfeit huggies diapers from amazon (invalid serial number for huggies 'points' and different build quality), Mach 3 razor blades, GE MWF Water filters, even a counterfeit baby bath. The…

Crap, "fulfilled by Amazon" was my last line of defense against crap products, variable shipping, unacceptable state at arrival, etc etc.

Even at that, I recently bought two books, both arrived damaged. Returned them (I really don't want to have to do that, and I thought "fulfilled by" would reduce that likelihood), and the replacements were damaged. I gave up.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#164

Post by throwaywgsid »

Amazon counterfeits are so common now I would say about half my orders in the last year have been fakes.

If you don't care about quality just get from AliExpress or eBay, why pay brand name price for the same knockoffs?

If you do care about quality buy from any online company with a physical presence. I never get counterfeits from stores with a lot of physical locations and prices are barely different.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#165

Post by throwaywgsid »

Amazon counterfeits are so common now I would say about half my orders in the last year have been fakes.

If you don't care about quality just get from AliExpress or eBay, why pay brand name price for the same knockoffs?

If you do care about quality buy from any online company with a physical presence. I never get counterfeits from stores with a lot of physical locations and prices are barely different.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#166

Post by dredmorbius »

ajross wrote: post #131
6stringmerc wrote: post #30

As a "Content Creator" and frequent advocate for U.S. Copyright Reform, this is one of the few instances where I think the full willful infringement penalty is absolutely justified. There's only a paper thin "Well they didn't inspect every book!" defense, which immediately falls apart when Amazon is making money by way of the transactions and doing market harm to the actual Copyright holder. It's not "incidental" inf…

> I think the full willful infringement penalty is absolutely justified Out of curiousity: how much is that? How much should Amazon pay? Would you support the same penalty if your local bookseller was found to have purchased a batch of counterfeits? You realize that happens all the time in retail, right? Many smaller retailers have little to no ability to control their supply chain in the way you're demanding from Am…

$150,000 per instance. Plus other damages.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-5

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#167

Post by dredmorbius »

BubbleFett wrote: post #79
6stringmerc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider my perspective is that eBay / Amazon / et al are acting with the least amount of policing effort they can legally or financially commit, then yes, I would like to advocate that a marketplace such as eBay should attempt to verify every item it sells is not counterfeit. I'd like to avoid being unrealistic in that I don't think a marketplace can 100% verify every item and grow to scale, but I'm also extr…

Totally sympathetic to the author here, and believe that the counterfeit should be taken down IMMEDIATELY (checking amazon it looks like this is the case) If the book was digital then I would say preemptive verification should be done. However, for a physical paper book how could you verify legitimacy at scale? It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and tha…

Certificates of provenance or authorisation.

If Amazon require a machine-readable mechanism, they've the heft to provide one.

PKI or Blockchain-all-the-things.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#168

Post by mbreese »

Chaebixi wrote: post #151
ajross wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the full willful infringement penalty is absolutely justified Out of curiousity: how much is that? How much should Amazon pay? Would you support the same penalty if your local bookseller was found to have purchased a batch of counterfeits? You realize that happens all the time in retail, right? Many smaller retailers have little to no ability to control their supply chain in the way you're demanding from Am…

> Would you support the same penalty if your local bookseller was found to have purchased a batch of counterfeits? The difference is that Amazon a sophisticated, knowledgeable seller with a lot of smart people who undoubtedly understand the problem and how to solve it quickly (eliminate co-mingled inventory). I would say a local bookseller is likely to be much less sophisticated when it comes to counterfeit products…

Also, the damage that a local bookseller can do to the copyright holder is pretty limited in comparison.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#169

Post by joshvm »

dfc wrote: post #111

We recently ordered four or five Oreilly Hadoop books from amazon and the printing was horrible. The fonts look terrible and simple things like grey backgrounds are not uniform. The book is still legible but the printing gets distracting at times. I thought it was an indication that Oreilly had lowered there standards.

I have a copy of Programming Robots with ROS in front of me which I was on the verge of sending back to Amazon. The text printing is fuzzy and images have noticeable banding. You can't read text in the screenshots it's so bad. It's like the book was printed in draft mode. I bought it a month ago.

Here's an example: https://imgur.com/X6KwHNm and another: https://imgur.com/nTflKSL

I bought it on sale, but this retails at £40. That's not acceptable. I've bought full colour textbooks with photo quality prints for the same price.

I had a look at a previous purchase, Fluent Python, and it's similar but not as bad. The animal icons (e.g. the ravens with little facts next to them) are still quite poorly printed. I bought that about 6 months ago.

Looking further back in time, I've got some pocket guides to Python and C. It could be a placebo - maybe the paper just feels nicer over time. The printing also looks better, but there aren't any big ink-dense graphics to give a fair comparison:

https://imgur.com/koeIpLO

The first two I bought from Amazon, the latter I bought from Blackwells, but that was years ago. The seller was just Amazon, not a 3rd party.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#170

Post by dredmorbius »

jessaustin wrote: post #122
dlubarov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the first sale doctrine means there can be other legit sellers. There's no way to be certain whether a third party seller is selling a counterfeit (except by buying it).

One could just buy a certain percentage of those allegedly resold items that have a lower-than-suggested price, and then report every one that turns out to be counterfeit.

That's definitely an option, and possibly a business opportunity. Downvotes are unwarranted.

Other options would be to require bonding or otherwise validating sellers, particularly over a certain volume. Amazon (and other retailers) might collectivise or bundle sellers, with an intermediate serving as a vouchsafe for quality and origin, if necessary.

Otherwise, this whole situation is a massive trust breakdown, for both sellers and buyers, and a major problem for Amazon generally.

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