Amazon and Intellectual Property

Amazon has a policy and tools designed to preserve the intellectual property rights of users of its platform, thus prohibiting the sale of any product that infringes this type of rights. Prohibited products include contraband, counterfeit or pirated copies of products or content; products that have been replicated, reproduced or manufactured illegally; and products that infringe the intellectual property rights of a third party.

Communication and cooperation with manufacturers, right holders, distributors, content providers is ongoing to improve detection and prevention capabilities in order to prevent non-original products from reaching customers.

Similarly, Amazon works with rights holders and law enforcement agencies around the world to take legal action against vendors and suppliers who violate this policy.

Among the tools referred to above, we highlight the latest service announced by Amazon, and which is already active in Spain, the Amazon Transparency service.

The Amazon Transparency service is a product traceability service to help protect brand owners who are properly protected against counterfeiting, as well as users against counterfeit products.

It is a product serialisation service that provides a unique, alphanumeric, non-sequential code for each unit that is manufactured.

When a trademark uses Transparency codes on a product, Amazon will search and scan these codes at its logistics centers to ensure that authentic products are shipped to customers. Units that fail Transparency authentication checks will be investigated for counterfeit products and acted upon.

This service also allows users to check the authenticity of products through a mobile application, with the trademarks simultaneously providing specific information for each unit, such as date and place of manufacture and other additional information.

The Transparency Service is currently available in the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and India.

This is a service or tool whose main purpose is to remedy or greatly mitigate the damage that counterfeiting causes to legitimately protected trademarks and the business entities behind them. A problem that affects all economic sectors, both online and offline.

An illustrative example of the advantages, benefits and effectiveness of this type of tool designed to protect the Intellectual Property Rights of third parties, are the results of the app of the Transparency Service in the United States, a pioneer in its implementation, where more than 4,000 trademarks are already registered with Transparency, generating more than 300 million unique codes, which has allowed Amazon to prevent more than 250,000 counterfeit products from reaching the hands of customers.

The importance of raising awareness about the protection of these Intellectual Property rights is transcendental for commerce, since it not only benefits the owners of the trademarks that market their products, but also and similarly, the users, clients and consumers of these products, who will be able to be certain that the products purchased are original, and therefore, will meet the expectations of the brand they have purchased.

Proof of this is that in 2019, of the products fully integrated in the Transparency service, there have been no reports of counterfeiting by trademarks or customers who have purchased products inserted in this service.

From CASAS ASIN as a law firm specialized in Intellectual Property we are in a position to offer you a complete and personalized advice on the procedure to follow to protect your Intellectual Property rights in case of possible infringements, as well as for the adaptation of this type of services in your company in order to avoid or minimize as much as possible the consequences of possible counterfiting.