Amazon reseller lobs sueball at etailer and Apple over listings yank An Amazon electronics reseller has filed a lawsuit against the mega-etailer alleging that the firm "conspired" with Apple to put it out of business because it was selling iPad covers at a cheap price. Hard 2 Find Accessories (H2F) claims that Amazon revoked its seller’s privileges, effectively closing its operations down, …
What could also have happened:
Both Amazon and Apple have people who are paid for looking for counterfeits. These people are lowly paid ops somewhere in India, who look at 300 offers per day. They see this offer is way cheaper than others for the same product, which is usually an indicator of a counterfeit or a scam. They are not perfect, and they can make mistakes. The protests of this merchants are undistinguishable from those of a scammer.
For Amazon, it is probably reasonable to kick out a honest merchant from time to time along with the scammers.
It really doesn't matter whether the cause is malice or stupidity, or disregard of contract or law, etc. Amazon is not so big it is exempt from being held liable when its actions cause harm.
On the contrary: the larger the company, and the greater its resources, the less excuse there is for failure to respond quickly to correct egregious errors. With greater power comes greater responsibility, not lesser.
H2F should be commended for taking action against yet another example of corporate carelessness. This is why we have courts and a justice system: for those occasions when injustice has occurred.
Bravo, H2F. Bravo.
There's a two part problem in all of this.
a) Somebody really needs to fix the clusterfuck that is post take down resumption of business to its previous state. Although I despise the way take down notices can be weaponized, there is a need for the mechanism to exist. Time really is a factor if you're dealing with a digital product. But iPad cases and physical goods in general, aren't time sensitive.
Send the fuckers a letter and get the accused in on the action. If you want to jump straight to the judge, fine. But if you're wrong about the infringement, fuck you. You pay for your mistake. Worse than weaponizing legal statutes, is weaponizing the country's courts. Courts are a public resource and you shouldn't be allowed to privatize public assets.
Got sidetracked, sorry. Once the shooting is over there's absolutely no reason to delay getting everybody back to selling stuff. No company should be allowed to inflict damage on the employees and their families by crushing a merchant over a civil matter.
b) Lawyers. Lawyers are the second problem in all this. I'm not sure Jose Public realizes how corporate law firms generally work. I'm not sure most journalists get it either. This sorry, like so many others, implies that Apple sent its lawyers after the seller. Most of the time that's not how it works.
Unless it's a very high profile case, company executives are rarely aware of the lawsuits the company is involved in. Most companies give their legal partners tremendous latitude in who to sue, why, and for how much. The argument goes that since lawyers understand the law it's best to let them handle legal matters without interference (really sucks software developers don't get the same latitude huh :). Precluding the high profile cases, large companies establish cost thresholds that escalate awareness of a particular case and require more authorization from higher up as the costs of a case grow.
Legal partners in huge companies are somewhat similar to big time security services. You provide then with resources and broad mission parameters and trust them to look after your interests unaided. You only find out what's going on when the security team is accused of murdering a village full of peasants. Same with law firms.
Hilariously, lawyers and security companies require you to give up a lot of control. There's simply no way to have the internal resources necessary to look at every case or inside every parcel in your mailbox. Our Chief Counsel is a guy I've worked with for over 25 years. He was the first person I hired when I started my company. He's been to my house for the holidays, knows my family, my Prole Hounds don't even try to bite him.
But I trust the obviously psychotic lunatic that's in charge of our facility security about 100x more than I trust my lawyer. I know nothing about the security guy except his name and I implicitly trust him to not do anything stupid/evil/greedy then try to justify his way out of it by citing legal precedent. I have no such trust in my lawyer.
My point, is that the overwhelming majority of IP cases aren't instigated at the behest of Corporate Overlords. The lawyers are running around, armed, with effectively no oversight and that's considered the best practice for publicly traded companies. Jackass activist shareholders have sued Corporate America so fucking much that not giving your legal team near complete autonomy is tantamount to company execs ordering Giant Pandas just to wipe their ass with.
So thanks for that you grundle scraping investors. Thanks a lot.
Then how it is a "conspiracy"? Seems more likely it just fell through the cracks at Amazon, or Amazon did an investigation of them and found something else amiss so that even with the Apple complaint resolved there were other matters involved?
As easy and fun as it is to implicate enormous corporations in colluding to destroy a merchants business, proving a conspiracy is really, really hard. That's why the Lizard People aren't concerned that we can plainly see the mind control gas, so called 'contrails', they disburse to prevent Man from participating in the Galactic Economy.
People tend to think corporations are structured, organized bastions of efficiency and process, but that's just wrong. The bigger a company is the more you find little fiefdoms setup inside that are effectively holes in the fabric of space-time where stuff just fucking disappears.
Sure, it's possible a conspiracy existed. Have you ever read through online product reviews? The world is chock full of fucking idiots and they've got to work somewhere. Maybe the instigator was unhappy with his purchase. But common sense and decades of experience have me leaning toward process failure, not conspiracy. I could be wrong, but I kind of doubt it.
Regardless of the merits of this particular case it highlights a problem with systems like this.
The Takedown Notice is a common theme on the internet and it always seems to follow the pattern of takedown first ask questions later. As such it is open to abuse. Got a competitor who is causing you problems? Fire off a few takedown notices. Even if they are proved to be invalid damage will have been done to your competitor and their only recourse will be a lengthy and no doubt expensive court action.
When considering allegations of counterfeiting we should compare the situation with that of the patent courts. How many actions are taken for breach of patent which subsequently fail? Such patents disputes require court action before anything happens, why shouldn't retailing takedown notices be subject to the same constraints.
The simple solution is that takedown notices such as this should not be actioned without a court order. Indeed it should be an offence for such action to be taken without a court order.
Have to agree with this 100%. It's time for somebody to sue and have the Takedown provision of the law overturned on the basis that it is Unconstitutional (at least in the US). It codifies holding the accused guilty before he can face his accuser and that's assuming he can face his accuser at all.
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