I wonder how many of these thumb drives are legit. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2+tb+thumb+drive&crid=YZ410MSN6L1...
First, Amazon's warehouse hold merchandise from other companies. Why should they be punished because Amazon or a different company is selling counterfeit goods.
Second, do the retailers know they are selling counterfeit products? There is a huge difference between intentionally deceiving people and getting hoodwinked by thieves. For example, if Amazon's employees decided to buy counterfeit and promote them, that would be wrong. However, what happens if an Amazon employee is tricked and thinks they are buying legitimate goods but are really buying fake goods. In the later case, Amazon is a victim of fraud and should not be punished.
Finally, punishments should be proportional to the crime. If I cause $5 worth of damage, I should not pay a $10,000 fine. Note I have noticed a lot of online posters push for draconian punishments and that is not just or helpful.
Everyone selling 2tb thumb drives knows they're selling counterfeit products, yes.
They will of course strategically claim ignorance if confronted - a lie only the most naive would believe.
Also, the word "knowingly" requires the person taking action to have the knowledge in their head. Someone else knowing it isn't enough to qualify.
Amazon's listings are not curated. Amazon knows nothing about fraudulent listings until later brought to their attention. These fake flash drives exist for short period of time until they are brought to Amazon's attention, at which point, they are taken down.
What's the point where we are going to say "it's not good enough to point at the 3rd party with the autogenerated name" and "computers at large"?
Someone that "knowingly sells counterfeit goods" is humanly aware that a specific item they are selling is counterfeit, and decide to sell it anyway, which is not the case here.
These listings are taken down whack-a-mole style as Amazon is made humanly aware of their existence.
Strange how easy it is to brush off accountability and still make a profit off of illegalities.
> Prior to the deal, Apple sent “hundreds of thousands of take-down notices” to Amazon to reduce counterfeits, and the company conducted test purchases on Amazon that “consistently returned high counterfeit rates
For example, there are books I purchased off of Amazon, directly from Amazon as new books, that I am not allowed to sell as used on their site. This wasn't always the case.
Fraudulent listings aren't specifically an Amazon problem, there's junk like the above example on basically every marketplace site. Search "2tb flash drive" on any of them. It's a fundamental problem with non-curated marketplaces.
The law requires explicit knowledge, so Amazon can get away with it.
I don’t agree with it, but lawmakers should be making these changes.
So, all those dodgy USB drives that are branded are infringing.
In the UK these are "counterfeit" and illegal to sell (not just tortuous, criminal).
I'm surprised if the USA code doesn't make these actions criminal and leaves them only as civil matters given how much the state choose to consider copyright as a criminal action?
> I mean, if I had repeated instances of someone else performing illegal activities in my basement, I can't continually, or even once, claim that I had no idea.
Amazon does not claim that they are unaware of counterfeit products on their platform. They do explicitly say they are aware of fraudulent products on their platform, and they have blogs on their website that talk about this.
> Just because it's hidden behind several layers of software abstraction does not mean that Amazon doesn't have explicit knowledge.
They are generally aware that marketplace sellers list fraudulent products. They are not specifically aware that any particular new listing is fraudulent until after the fact.
> These products even physically sit in their own warehouses.
Sometimes they do, but not all of the time. However, putting the item in a warehouse does nothing to authenticate it.
> However, putting the item in a warehouse does nothing to authenticate it.
Those are both Amazon's problems and not customers' or the law's problems. Here's an idea: if you are constantly ingesting fraudulent products in your warehouses and shopping site, maybe do something about it?
Things are not working if consumers don't know what they're buying and government departments devoted to enforcing correct information in the market are doing nothing about it.
What government would kill the goose that lays golden eggs? They pay tax. Buyers pay tax. Huge amount (but not that much as I expected [0]). What else is needed?
0 - https://www.investopedia.com/insights/amazon-effect-us-econo...
What little taxes they pay state/locally are next to nothing because of sweetheart deals in exchange for locating warehouses and offices in particular areas...deals which mean they likely pay less tax than the costs they incur on the communities in terms of services and infrastructure.
Ironically, Amazon skated sales tax to such a degree that Congress had to change the law.
1) Farming the tax cattle (ex: speeding tickets)
2) Tracking down and punishing “foxes in the hen house” who disrupt their tax cattle (ex: a murderer easily destroys $1M in taxes per tax cow killed, gotta stop that)
3) Turf wars vs other gangs who would usurp their role as farmer
If it were any of those things, it would be liable for safety issues of the products it sells, among other things.
I suspect “other things” includes “knowingly operating a cartel that violates patent and copyright law on a larger scale than any other organization in the western hemisphere; primarily by importing illegal and unsafe counterfeit goods into the US”.
I have no idea why the courts have gone along with this scheme. My guess is that it’s corruption.
Customer Obsession and Earns Trust might be two of Amazon's Leadership Principles, but no principles stand in the way of cold hard cash.
My favorite example of this was I was browsing the "top 50" computer science books on Amazon. This was about 10 years ago. In the top 50, they had basic how to books (like how to use Linux or Excel), books on getting coding jobs, etc. They had almost no actual computer science books and yet, the top 50 list software almost certainly created by people with a computer science degrees!! The list even listed the same title more than once in a few cases. It was obvious that the software which built the list was broken and either had not been tested or was deployed in a known broken state. Customer obsession does not mean shipping obviously broken software which does not help the customer.
As for trust, when I canceled Prime, Amazon used dark patterns to make the process as painful as possible. Not much to say other than I do not trust companies which try to trick me into not canceling a subscription I do not want.
I wonder whether they used Samsung's factory tooling for that.
People in my world goggle at me when I say I don’t shop on Amazon, but whenever I do go on there I couldn’t be happier not to be paying for the privilege of combing through all of that garbage. (Amazon Visa rewards card holder since 2007 and had Prime 2010-2019)