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Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

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" infringement like photocopying a chapter from a book and emailing around the office or the Amazon corporate mailing list. That's more innocent. This is some straight up commercial hustle we're talking about.

I'm tired of the refrain "It's too much effort / money / investment to check X, Y, Z on our system" when that system is the only goddamn reason a company exists in the first place. Want to be a Middle Man? You get the Profits and Responsibilities of one. Caveat venditor.

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Indeed, this kind of thing is what copyright was originally designed for. The fun thing is that even back then they were making mistakes such as the long copyright period in Berne Convention.

Do you also advocate that eBay should verify every item it sells is not counterfeit?

If it passes through eBay's hands, then I would.

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 disagree that the onus should be on Amazon to make sure the items people fulfill using their services are not fakes.

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.

I'll be extremely surprised if that is the case. I'm going to wait for the official response before passing judgement. Amazon can easily afford a $150,000 fine for copyright infringement, but the damage to their reputation would be colossal.

That was absolutely the case with Linux Command Line and it appears to be the case here as well. I say appears because I have yet to receive the product but the manufacturing looks exactly the same as the last counterfeit. The same traits.

I was under the impression that "under Amazon's brand" meant that the item is being "sold by Amazon" rather than a merchant using Amazon as a platform.

I think eBay should verify items that are being sold by eBay, and Amazon should verify items that are being sold by Amazon, but eBay shouldn't be responsible for items being sold VIA eBay, nor should Amazon be responsible for items being sold VIA Amazon.

I'd be interested to have more detail than the tweet to understand the specifics.

If they are saying Amazon is producing and selling these themselves, then that's a big deal. If they got a shipment of them that are counterfeit and are selling those, then it's a slightly less big deal IMHO, but still a serious problem.

Yes, Amazon is producing and selling these. That is what makes this so outrageous.

That was the case with Linux Command Line. It appears to be the case here as well

The problem, as I understand it, is that Amazon mixes inventory from various sellers as long as its the same product. Or appears to be. It makes sense on paper but obviously doesn't work when counterfeit products slip into the stock.

If that's the case, ironically enough counterfeit sellers might actually end up having original products shipped / fulfilled by Amazon, which might add to the confusion, e.g. positive customer reviews on a bad listing.

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 extremely annoyed at the "all or nothing" kind of false dichotomy you've presented.

I'm not trying to be insulting or glib with the following, but if you'd like to peruse several different threads in this discussion it appears Amazon has more than enough reasonable data to address an issue, but has heretofore turned a blind-yet-financially-beneficial-in-principle-eye to the situation. If a bunch of humans sitting around and spit balling can hammer down a half-dozen examples and concerns out of altruism then I think any attempts of offloading that 'check and balance' into the Amazon system is quite significant.

If they get around to it, I'd classify their pragmatic motivation as akin to "I'm sorry your feelings were hurt" moreso than "What I did hurt you and was wrong."

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 that's a lot of manual effort.

What would you propose? Not trying to be confrontational, legitimately curious!

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.

In both cases a five year old child could tell the difference in an instant.

It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and that's a lot of manual effort.

I've worked at places with serious quality management systems, the problem isn't hard. The answer is easy and obvious: incoming inspection.

Unless "scale" means the percentage of product that passes through inspection is zero. In which case the problem is only hard because the problem isn't how to do something, the problem is how get the benefit of having done something without doing it (whether through inspection, not co-mingling, etc...).

In the case of No Starch Press, the build quality issues were noticeable without scanning the book. And even cutting the spine and covers off of a book to scan it isn't that much manual effort with the right hardware. One of the offices at my college had the cutter and bulk scanner, it was so not a big deal for them to use that they'd digitize a semester's worth of course textbooks for anyone who asked.

What annoys me is that they do not share that data with consumers. Just rely on people to self report issues in feedback which is not the same thing. If the seller takes two weeks to reply to a query from a customer then that should be reported.

> 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 Amazon.

I mean... this is bad. It should stop. Vendors need to be careful. Amazon's partner programs create some bad incentives that put too much of the risk on consumers. All of that is true.

But guys... the Amazon hate in this thread is just out of control. Counterfeits happen. A lot.

> 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 and how they enter the supply chain.

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

$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

> 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?

No, Amazon is a huge multinational company, selling 1000s of this crap every singe day. Can you say the same about your local bookseller, moving 20 books in total a day?

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.

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