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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

What policy do you believe would prevent new sellers from selling counterfeits while still allowing legitimate sellers?

My understanding is that Amazon basically does everything they can short of inspecting every unit, which is infeasible.

When a merchant account is opened, it should be possible to accurately identify an individual responsible such that civil/criminal charges can be filed against him. Anything short of that will end up with a new account opened the next day, and it doesn't matter the platform.

I actually prefer the current chaos to something like Youtube where they have given rights owners an (practically) unappealable veto over everyone's content. Yes, I know that 98% of the strikes are probably correct, but some are completely bogus and others are exploiting fair use correctly.

One of the first things we would lose with a Youtube style agreement is the doctrine of first sale.

Right now they require ID when opening new accounts. My understanding (based on talking to sellers) is that it became significantly more difficult to open new accounts when this policy went into effect. Sophisticated criminals willing to fake IDs or commit identity fraud are hard to counter.

I do think they could enforce an insurance requirement which would help pay out civil judgements, at least.

By the way, YouTube claims are easily disputed in almost all cases, with the exception of UMG which has a contractual right to veto counternotices. Otherwise, YouTube responds to disputes reasonably, in my understanding. This wasn't always the case, many of the favorable policies are only a few years old, such as holding revenue in escrow until a dispute is resolved.

I don't think they can bring criminal charges just for opening an account. But if they continue to do business after supplying false information that might be some kind of fraud.

But they could also just enforce stricter rules around reviewing and approving sellers. While not having the threat of legal action it is something they have much more control around.

Stop commingling inventory. At the very least, stop commingling third party and Amazon inventory so that if I order an item that is "sold by Amazon.com" I can be reasonably sure I'm not going to get a counterfeit item.

That's a way to allow people to pay more for a slightly lower chance of receiving counterfeit products. It's not a way to reduce counterfeit overall.

As I pointed out elsewhere in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107150, commingling doesn't significantly affect counterfeiting.

My question above was "What policy do you believe would prevent new sellers from selling counterfeits while still allowing legitimate sellers?". Abolishing the commingling program doesn't do that.

So your position is that Amazon itself knowingly sells counterfeit items? Otherwise I don't see how stopping commingling gives a "slight" reduction in the chances of receiving a counterfeit item when buying directly from Amazon.

The chances of receiving a counterfeit in general are very low. And there are some who've accused Amazon of selling counterfeits directly, so the odds there aren't 0.

The relative reduction is probably large, but if it's something like one in 100k instead of one in 10k, that's a slight reduction on an absolute level.

>The chances of receiving a counterfeit in general are very low.

Well, that's open for debate, and the concrete data is so scarce that it's hard to have any meaningful debate, but I thin we disagree here.

>And there are some who've accused Amazon of selling counterfeits directly...

Got a link for such an accusation? I've only ever seen them accused of commingling third party inventory with their own, which sometimes results in receiving a counterfeit item when buying directly from Amazon, but that's a very different thing from Amazon procuring and selling counterfeits.

Lawsuits. William Sonoma and Mercedes Benz have both sued Amazon claiming they sold counterfeit. Popsockets recently told Congress that Amazon had sold counterfeits (although as I commented in the recent HN thread on that (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079904), popsockets has been bullying other sellers in ways I view as illegitimate, so I take anything they say with a grain of salt.)

This is nothing unique to Amazon, by the way. I could show you lawsuits against Walmart and Costco for selling counterfeits. Every massive retail company that doesn't buy 100% from the manufacturer is going to eventually have some leaks. You buy from the grey market, vast majority of the time you get legitimate cheaper product, occasionally someone scams you.

Oh, and Apple famously sued Mobile Star LLC claiming that they had sold Amazon counterfeit products through Vendor, which was "sold and shipped by Amazon.com".

Links to all above cases:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6173730/daimler-ag-v-am...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4495986/apple-inc-v-mob...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8418854/williams-sonoma...

Don't sell things from untrusted random individuals. End the marketplace program and commingling.

Getting rid of the entire marketplace, which is more than half their sales, just to stop a relatively small counterfeiting issue seems overkill to me, but you're entitled to your opinion.

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