
Amazon tackling counterfeits by letting brands delete knockoffs - toss1
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/amazon-announces-project-zero-to-reduce-counterfeit-products.html
======
Zenst
Whilst I'm sure brands will love this ability, let us not lose sight of what
this is. Amazon has a responsibility not to sell counterfeit goods, a legal
one in many countries. What they are doing is in effect offloading their
responsibility onto the brands in policing their shop for such counterfeits.
Now I'm sure they are not going to totally depend upon this level of
counterfeit policing, and customer feedback. But customer feedback does seem
to be a driving force for them in identifying counterfeits currently and with
this. Are Amazon shifting work they are responsible for onto others for zero
pay? For me, it does seem that way, though I hope I'm wrong.

~~~
toss1
Interesting take. I'd ordinarily be suspicious of similar offloading of work.

But in this case, my impression was that each brand owner would be the most
knowledgeable & motivated agent in the ecosystem to seek & deactivate the
counterfeiters.

My biggest concern was that it could empower the brands to abuse the
opportunity, and shut down competitors with false allegations of
counterfeiting, like the fake DMCA notices for YouTube videos.

At least Amazon is saying that they'll be monitoring for this; we'll see how
they do.

I also thought one of the most important items was buried in the text, a
system to send special barcodes identifying product. I'm guessing it would be
like a pre-authorization for shipments, so Brand X would send Amazon a
database list of IDs tagged to production runs, and they'd send matching
barcodes on the actual shipped product. Anything not matching the ID scheme
would get rejected. Distributors could send product in with the IDs, and
they'd match, counterfeiters would fail to match, even if they knew of the IDs
in general. Seems good to me.

