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Navigating the Two Sides of Amazon's Take-Down Process
It's no surprise that Amazon, one of the world's largest retailers for entertainment products, maintains its own process for managing infringement and counterfeit allegations. This process has opened up new strategies for asserting and defending infringement claims. In this article, we explain how copyright, trademark and patent infringement issues unfold on Amazon by describing the process for rights holders to report infringement, and the impact of successful infringement take-down requests. We also address the situation where an infringement dispute evolves into a lawsuit, the resulting personal jurisdiction and state law issues that may arise.
Whether Amazon investigators reviewing take-down requests are attorneys or have any background in intellectual property rights is unclear. The take-down mechanism allows rights owners to seek removal of allegedly infringing products from Amazon's website. The take-down request provides a rights owner with several drop-down choices and a space to identify the allegedly infringing product by listing the corresponding Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). The take-down request does not ask for information to identify the accused infringer or its location.
But after a request is submitted and an email is sent to the rights owner confirming receipt, Amazon may send a subsequent email seeking additional information. Once Amazon has made its determination on the take-down request, the rights holder will receive an email explaining whether Amazon has decided to remove the accused items. In cases where Amazon has refused to remove the reported items, Amazon permits the rights holder to seek reconsideration by essentially submitting a new request. The process is subjective and, therefore, an identical take-down request may be resubmitted and subsequently accepted despite a prior rejection. To our knowledge, there is no limitation on the number of requests a rights holder can file for the removal of a particular item and there is no fee for submitting a take-down request.
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