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Comment by alok-g | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's position and efforts against counterfeits:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/our-company/our-positions

Wow. Are they fucking serious?

They blame federal law for not prosecuting counterfeiters instead of themselves for allowing them to run rampant on their website? (i.e. They want the federal government to do their house-cleaning for them.)

I never thought I'd read such a dumb excuse from a company this big.

You seem to have missed the part about the investments they have made for the same, perhaps doing themselves what you suggest.

Their counterfeit problem is rooted in policy, not technology.

I would like to hear more. What policy? :-)

Probably the co-mingled inventory policy.

The investments they've done for something that is their resposibility in the first place.

If I go to a restaurant and the food is rancid, I wouldn't be appeased when the owner tells me "we've made investments to stop the food from going bad, we even bought a refrigerator!".

The analogy is not valid.

The marketplace at Amazon makes it a (large scale) mall, or a food court for your analogy, not the shop that is selling. If the food from a restaurant at a mall comes out bad, would you blame the restaurant, or the mall?

The fact that Amazon displays the product—including choosing which description from different sources to use when there are multiple sources of the same product—charges my credit card, handles returns, etc., makes it more like a shop than a mall or food court. It's a consignment shop that has to pay the person who made the product available for sale once it sells, when that person is not Amazon itself, but it's still a shop. It's not like a mall or food court that provides a venue through which I gain access to directly interact with individual vendors.

So what in your opinion should the company do (or not do)?

I blame federal law for not prosecuting Amazon for selling so many counterfeit products. Amazon is the one selling them. They are responsible for ensuring they deliver the product that the buyer is paying for, and not some cheap knock-off

I blame the numbskulls that keep ordering from Amazon after getting burned.

I am always perplexed and bemused on these threads by all the people who will openly admit, "Amazon sent me junk and didn't care, but I still buy things from them."

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