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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Precisely. If I can't trust Amazon to detect a counterfeit Apple charger, then why would I trust them to test anything for something even more subtle?

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Amazon isn't making this, they probably don't see samples of every good, and they definitely don't grind up the whole product and test it. It's paint and pigment that has lead/cadmium so only certain colours and portions of the products will have these qualities.

But this is exactly why my confidence is shaken -- if Amazon has trouble vetting products from one of the most tightly controlled supply chains (Apple) why should I trust them with anything else?

They don't test, but I'm not sure they care so much about the volume of fakes and vendors selling them.

Amazon sells illegitimate books with identical covers to a legit copy and keeps selling them after the authors contact Amazon .... like it's not even hard to detect those, but they don't.

Detecting individual merchants distributing fake book copies to potentially one of many stores in a multi national distribution network is simple?

The examples I'm thinking of were authors who published their own book and ordered the printing themselves. They weren't printing in bulk and then distributing them... it was direct only.

Amazon simply didn't care when fakes started showing up, missing pages, bad printing, but the covers were always identical.

Apple is a bad example, because they made a deal with them last year and kicked all the unauthorized sellers off.

I think it's a great example, because it shows what happens when the counterfeited product is made by a company with the legal army to do something about it, it gets handled by Amazon. For the other 99.9% of companies making a product in the world, they're simply fucked by Amazon turning a blind eye to the problem and they can't do anything about it.

Apple legal had nothing to do with it. It was purely a business decision.

Apple wanted to control unauthorized (even authentic) sellers, Amazon wanted to buy directly from Apple and carry more of their products, they negotiated and reached an agreement.

Amazon has rolled out Transparency, which is a way for any brand, regardless of size, to cheaply block the vast majority of counterfeits by putting a unique label on every product. Brands can also file complaints against counterfeiters which get acted on very quickly.

I am not a Amazon Seller, so this might be incorrect. I remember reading that to avail the unique label/id with the Transparency program, the Seller must use the Amazon provided unique label/id also for the units sold outside of Amazon. So in effect handing over your overall sales data to Amazon.

That is correct. The idea being that people should be able to sell authentic product even if purchased elsewhere.

That is a power play by Amazon. They could have implemented an open code generation algorithm where manufacturers could opt to generate their own codes signed by a public key, without sharing manufacturing quantities with Amazon, and accomplished the same thing, but chose not to.

I suppose a manufacturer with the current system could hide quantities by generating way more codes than they actually need and only using a small percentage of them.... even with that Amazon could detect which ones were scanned and how often, so the manufacturer would have to randomly scan the unused codes, and maybe rotate the IP addresses they use!

An open protocol not controlled by any one player would be much preferred.

Sure. In exchange for solving your entire counterfeit problem in one fell swoop, you give Amazon a bit of info. For anyone with significant issues with counterfeits, this is vastly cheaper and more effective than having to test order unauthorized sellers to see if the goods are authentic.

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