Amazon's knock-off problem (35 Shades of Grey, anyone?) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's knock-off problem (35 Shades of Grey, anyone?)

tech.fortune.cnn.com

59 pointsiProject51 comments

A couple of years ago, my wife, who is relatively computer savvy (not compared to HN users, just to the general public) tried to buy a Miley Cyrus album for a young acquaintance. Instead she got a Miles Cyrus album, which was a guy singing bad covers (though they could be a lot worse) of Miley Cyrus songs.

I still find that highly amusing, but it's also a huge failure on Amazon's part. There's no way that was the album anyone was looking for.

This is a really interesting phenomenon but arguably happening before Amazon markets became a thing. For example, in the mid-90s, knock-off band Los del Mar got on the charts with a largely indistinguishable cover of "Macarena" by Los del Rio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarena_(song)#Los_Del_Mar_ver...

A few months ago I was about to buy a 80s compilation album in MP3 format from Amazon based on nothing more than the names of the songs, when I noticed one of the reviews (not even the top one) was complaining about how these were not the original artists. Sure enough I played a few of the samples and I realized that while the songs (and lyrics) were generally the same, not only the pitch was all wrong on some of them, but the voices and instruments were all kind of "off". Needless to say I ended up not buying the album.

I think Amazon needs to allow these things on their catalog but at the same time they need to be more clear about the fact that these are either not originals or (in the case of the books) that they're really rip-offs of popular media. It's fairly obvious that these are little more than scams, but the no-returns-allowed electronic format itself and the fact that the amounts involved are small probably plays a part in preventing people from complaining too much once they realize that they've fallen for it.

Could have been worse: it could have been Miley Cyrus.

Even if you get the spelling right, the "Tribute to _" albums from "Cover Nation" or whoever are pretty clearly designed to trick people. I've noticed the scammers tend to cover artists whose music is not available for download, so they don't even have to compete against the original artist.

I was going to write about this very thing a couple of hours ago although itunes not amazon, but I think the principle is the same.

If you go to itunes and search for any popular song (pre-released songs are the best for it) there are always a lot of shadily labelled covers that are there to trick buyers into purchasing them. I've been caught out by it once before (not paying much attention, see the title matches and hit "buy").

It's not like these songs aren't making sales, quite a few have a large number of reviews (some asking wtf?) and because the character limits in itunes allow for you to cleverly disguise the songs they are a great way to make quick money. For example for the new Justin Bieber single "Boyfriend" there is a group called "Justin Bieber Tribute Team", their name shows as "Justin Bieber..." because of the cut off and they have a song out called "Boyfriend", which is just an instrumental version of the real song, it has ~40 reviews of people saying they love Justin and this is an amazing new song, or saying "wtf is this".

iTunes has a preview button for all tracks, right? (Besides, "Julia bieber" gives the cover two stars)

I once bought a $10 iBook on itunes, thinking it was the movie. There, I've said it.

Same problem happens on iTunes, to be honest. There are a lot of karaoke albums out there, and if a song is out of print, or not buyable by the song, they might be the top hit on a search.

I'm sure Amazon would've accepted a return if asked.

I acknowledge that there may be some confusion around knock-off products, but the Amazon customer service has always been top rate in my experience.

IMO, customer service starts well before the product has been purchased.

Amazon might make some double sales (the fake, then the original once a mistake has been realised), but in the long run I think this damages their reputation somewhat.

So publishing houses fill a need after all?

But seriously, in theory, crowd sourcing of editorial reviews should resolve this. But the reviews are not as well surfaced on other devices. If you shoulder surf the computer illiterate, you'll find it amazing what they're happy to click unquestioningly.

The only way to combat this is either deny self-publishing (bad solution), or improve customer trust signals to the point it's not profitable for a self-publisher to assemble even a 23 page pamphlet.

Amazon should step up and make trust signals more prominent.

// "The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo" sounds much more interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Girl-Tattoo-Adam-Roberts/dp/B00...

Commercial publishers, though not as blatant about it, are nearly as bad in their own way. A financially successful book is guaranteed to spawn hordes of imitations from "respectable" publishing houses.

I was in a physical Barnes & Noble store not long ago and noted that they now have an entire section labeled "Teen Paranormal Romance".

That's mixing things up. Imitation isn't the problem here: clones happen of all successful products, and that's a good thing.

The problem is fraud. These titles and authors (and sometimes cover art) are deliberately similar to existing products and appear designed to catch sales from people who aren't paying attention. That's not the same thing at all.

I dunno. While I'm not a connoisseur of that genre, some of the imitations do seem to be deliberately designed to skirt just this side of the line that would get them sued and/or indicted.

"Yeah, we'll call ours...Moonlight, and we'll make the guy a zombie, no a mummy!, not a vampire..."

Clearly the "books" in the referenced article are way over the line, wherever it is. That's why I said "not quite as blatant". However, I don't think the position of that line is quite as firm as you're suggesting.

I still think you're confused. Making a Twilight knockoff about mummies isn't going to get you sued or indicted. The content, in fact, really doesn't matter. The point is are you deliberately trying to confuse buyers who want Twilight into buying your book instead by mistake?

That's just not a feasible attack vector with brick & mortar stores, where you can't draw eyeballs without paying for very expensive off-shelf displays. But on Amazon, you can game the search results to put up a page that looks to an uninformed buyer like the genuine product. That's fraud, or nearly so, and it's absolutely not what the me-too publishing world does.

I've seen "fake O'Reilly" paper books from other publishers that use cover designs very similar to real O'Reilly books.

They were quite obviously intended to deceive an unsuspecting buyer into thinking the book was an O'Reilly product.

If this is a significant problem in the market, then it also an opening for a site which filters out the copy-cats and tries to make money on affiliate links to various stores.

I don't think there is any debate that there is value to be added by curation. The conversation gets confused when people talk about 'publishing houses' like they exist today, and a curation entity which will replace them in the future.

A great example is the Apple 'AppStore' versus the Android 'Marketplace' (now please if you are a huge fan, don't worry, not disparaging either!). The market dynamics of the AppStore which is highly curated by Apple and the MarketPlace (nee Google Play) which is only loosely curated by Google create two sets of orthogonal problems. In the AppStore people complain that opaque and arbitrary rules prevent them from being made available, in the Marketplace people complain that lax supervision and accountability allows crap and malware to flourish.

Generally the market response to this sort of problem is an an open market and an evaluation agency. The agency applies a set of evaluations to the product and then 'approves' it (allowing the use of trademarks and trade dress associated with said approval), it is accompanied by an outreach program which educates consumers. The business is monetized by reviews, affiliate marketing, and advertising.

Perhaps the most directly applicable example in the 21st century is 'AngiesList' which started, if you can believe Angie, as a list of places she knew and approved of. Its a trivial business to start, the leverage is in the ubiquity. So a long haul (time) of providing the list of approved/reviewed applications, the trade dress, and of course enforcing it when others try to insinuate approval when they don't have it.

Adam Roberts has a few parody books (eg "The Soddit"). He also has some good science fiction books. I particularly enjoyed Salt, and New Model Army.

As of this writing there are 15 separate Amazon sellers claiming to have new and used copies of my print-on-demand book. Their prices range from $12 to $888.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1461178185/sr=/qid=/r...

I haven't called their bluff to see whether they are just lazily-evaluating the book (buy it from Amazon and drop-ship) or whether they are printing copies themselves. I suspect the former, but the latter would be exceedingly clever too.

There is no way to report spammers or otherwise find out what the hell is going on, and I gather Amazon is uninterested in fixing the problem. Either way they make money.

I think the really interesting thing here is that the seller that is reselling your book for $800 has what I would call a pretty good seller reputation, at 92% positive out of almost 1000 ratings. Crazy.

My friend wanted to buy me a kickstarter-backed card game called Cards Against Humanity which has been sold out for some time, so she forked over a good bit of money (several times the retail price) to buy what she thought was a rare unopened copy on Amazon. Advertised clearly as such, complete with pictures of the actual game.

It turned out what she actually got was a crappy homemade set of print-outs made off of a PDF the company provides for people to make their own copy of the game for personal use. Their site specifically states '...you can use and remix our game for free, but you can’t sell it. Please do not steal our name or we will smash you'. Needless to say, she was pretty disappointed. She returned it and got her money back with no issue (except for the shipping she paid for both ways); the seller claimed he had no idea he was selling counterfeits. I imagine they made quite a bit of money doing this and taking advantage of people too lazy to go through the return process. It's really a shame, but sadly policing the market seems to be an extremely difficult problem (at least economically) considering how many products are listed.

You all should read my new book, "Grieg, Erdős, Breugel" Sincerely Yours, Hoff Dougstadtler

... an Eternal Silver Knot.

You know, if someone did manage to make a connection among those three I'd buy it.

You mean: buy my book, put it on your shelf and not read it

I had this too when I bought an iPad Smart Cover. The price is really the only way you could know it was a knock-off product:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004TEPN8M/ref=oh_o00_s00...

Fortunately I just needed something cheap for a single journey I was making using the company's device, but the fact it says the word Apple, uses their part number & is one of the top-selling items in the category, I can see how many would be fooled.

I read the comments and assumed it to be fake (it very clearly is), but I can imagine most people would not get that far and happily stump up the cash - e.g. those who don't realise that Amazon allows 3rd party sellers.

Holy shit!

Edit: Are you sure MC942ZM/A is a real apple part number? Try googling it. Your point stands, though.

Ha, well no. But clearly it's meant to emulate an Apple SKU.

Yet another way it's using all the look and feel of an Apple item purchase to confuse the seller.

I think the problem is that even if the buyer is aware that orders may be fulfilled by a third party (big IF), it's not unreasonable that a buyer may assume there's been some kind of vetting to prove legitimacy.

I've recently noticed a lot of self-published books on Amazon that just pull their text straight from Wikipedia articles, like this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-Pictocha...) or this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-Pictocha...). Most of them have little disclaimers that presumably get them past Amazon's rules but they're still cluttering up a lot of search results and doubtless tricking a few people.

It's not only lookalikes that plague Amazon, but also counterfeit products. E.g. my girlfriend once bought a Playstation 3 controller from the Amazon marketplace. When it arrived, it looked virtually identical to the controller that came with the PS3. I did notice that the quality seemed a bit worse, but assumed that Sony opted for cheaper production.

Fast forward a few months, and suddenly the controller stops working. After checking some websites, we found out that Sony disabled some series of counterfeit controllers.

Luckily, Amazon refunded the money. But it is still a nuisance.

A while back I was looking for Thinkpad batteries on Amazon and literally every one was counterfeit (even though half of them were called "Genuine Lenovo", they'd have plenty of comments disagreeing). It's pretty sad.

Amazon doesn't do much to filter out counterfeit items, it seems. From personal experience, a non-trivial number of shoe merchants on Amazon sell fakes.

This happens in every marketplace. I used to be a marketplace seller on Amazon and they are so strict (more strict than every other marketplace), that I would be very surprised if the company you bought it from is still selling.

I wasn't selling counterfeits or violating any rules and got kicked. Many people get kicked if their automated system thinks you are somehow selling counterfeits or violating any rules...and there is no real way to appeal it.

This sounds similar to what The Asylum does (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAsylum); they make extremely cheap knockoffs of big-name movies, like "Transmorphers", and rely on people not paying attention to inadvertently buy or rent their movies. It's apparently incredibly profitable.

Or less cynically they make funny knockoff movies that a lot of purple watch on purpose. The book thing is pure scam.

This is not a new problem. It's been common long enough, at least, that Monty Python made a lovely sketch about it several decades ago: http://www.montypython.net/scripts/bookshop.php

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ayoutube.com+bookshop+j...

Brilliant. Is there a subculture of collectors of "fake" products sold on Amazon? Surely some people prefer fakes...

Razor blades seem to be another thing supposedly often counterfeited on Amazon. See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000277P5E for example.

But I'm assuming you're safe when the item "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com."

I don't see how this is a problem at all.

It's no different than stopping at "Dairy King" and being disappointed in the ice cream. Eat somewhere else next time.

In fact, there are plenty of legitimate artistic works that have the exact same name. You can't copyright a title, and you shouldn't be able to. Maybe Isaac Worthington, with a little practice, will become a well-respected writer. Certainly you can't blame a guy who wrote a book about Steve Jobs for calling it "Steve Jobs".

For the biggest acts it feels like the solution was already found (for the most part) by Twitter with their fancy verified checkmarks.

There have been a lot of anti-amazon articles lately.

I've seen similar shenanigans at brick and mortar stores where what looked like a "Sharpie" was actually a "Skerple" with a clever font. Lame.

I've seen the same at Big Lots as "Shapiro".

They wear out in 2 or so days.

Try the "Staunion" brand fake Sharpies - worked well for me ;-) . Some fakes can be better than the real thing (There was a fake Syma clone mini-copter I kept buying more of because they were better than the real ones in particular ways).

In countries with poor counterfeit product policing, consumers learn which fakes to buy, or which sellers to trust. Just like buying LSD or Ecstasy :-)

if you think book knockoffs are amazon's biggest problem, try to buy anything else!

it's like browsing dealextreme.com

101% of the non-book products are either:

   a) not the real brand
   b) appears on the listing as $3.00 with $17.99 shipping

Crazy shipping prices would only happen with shady 3rd party merchants. Filter with "Prime eligible" to only get items that are shipped out of Amazon's fulfillment centers.

This isn't at all my experience, and I buy from Amazon quite a lot. Can you cite any specific examples?

A bigger problem for me is the almost totally broken search.

Try searching for Fuze (Sansa Fuze, an MP3 player) and then selecting "in Electronics & Photo" and then sorting by price.

You end up with pages and pages of power adaptors; cords; cases; screen covers; etc. And the paging mechanism for Amazon only lets you scroll one page at a time.

There are very many examples of this.

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