What should Amazon sellers do if they are complained of trademark infringement?

In the cross-border e-commerce circle where intellectual property rights are paid more and more attention, especially at the moment when Amazon is cracking down on related infringements more and more strictly, many sellers may be a little careless when choosing products, and if they don’t pay attention for a while, they will be involved in infringement and receive an official warning from Amazon. The better result is that the goods are removed from the shelves, and the worst, even the whole store may be blocked. So when we encounter this situation, what should we do in the first place?

Before this, Mai Jia supports to take you to understand what the common Amazon infringement mainly refers to:

Copyright: Also called “copyright”. It is a time-limited right to protect the intellectual property of the author. Copyright is the legal ownership of the right to copy computer programs, literary works, musical works, photos, movies, etc. Copyright is usually considered to belong to the author unless it is transferred to another person.

Trademark: refers to the exclusive right enjoyed by the trademark owner to his trademark. Refers to the exclusive and exclusive rights enjoyed by the trademark owner to its trademark.

Utility Patent: the exclusive right to a new technical scheme proposed by a product, method or its improvement.

Design Patent: it is a new aesthetic design made for the shape, pattern or their combination of products and the combination of color and shape and pattern. It should be noted here that more than 60% of the appearance patents are similar and regarded as infringing fakes.

If the seller writes the copyright works or trademarks of the other party in his own title, five points and product details without the official authorization of the brand, it is an infringement. And if the products you sell are invented by others, and others have applied for patent protection, you produce and sell them without permission, which is undoubtedly infringement. These behaviors may be officially handled by the Amazon platform.

If we receive an official email from Amazon, first check the store products according to the email:

If the complaint email has clearly infringed the trademark right of the other party and informed the trademark name and trademark registration number in detail, we can first enter the official website of the Trademark Office to inquire whether this trademark really exists.

If there is such a trademark, don’t panic first. We have to carefully check whether the trademark category registered by the other party is consistent with the product category complained in our own shop. For example, if the other party complains about the electronic products you sell with a 25-category (clothing category) trademark, then the infringement is not established, because the trademark is protected by classification. In addition, it should be noted that if the other party uses a trademark registered in China to complain about the infringement of the products you sell in Amazon USA, it is also invalid, because the trademark is protected regionally.

After checking and verifying, if we find that we have indeed infringed, we must first remove the links of related infringing products. Secondly, in the face of this situation, how should we complain?

Step 1: Say hello at the beginning of the email.

Dear Amazon,

Thank you very much for giving me a chanceto appeal the removal of our Amazon selling privileges.First we apologize for our wrong behaviour.

Step 2: Explain the root cause of trademark infringement. The expression is unintentional infringement. For example, new employees don’t know Amazon rules, or they don’t know that the trademark has been registered.

The new employee who is not familiar with Amazon policy listed generic items against the branded ASIN

Step 3: Measures we have taken against this infringement:

(1) Take the initiative to contact the right party and apologize for our wrong behavior.

We have contacted the rights owner at the first time to apologize sincerely for our mistakes.

(2) For the infringement of ASIN, we delete all of them, and strictly review all other listing.

We have deleted all ASINs involved in the copyright infringement. We also checked the remaining ASINs to eliminate the risk of infringement.

(3) In view of employees’ mistakes, we conduct training to strengthen the awareness of intellectual property protection.

We have strengthened the staff training about Amazon policy to raise the awareness of intellectual property rights protection.

The fourth step: concluding remarks, showing your sincere attitude.

We are new seller on Amazon, but we hope we can have chance to provide selling service on Amazon, we will do our best to be a good faith seller.We hope Amazon can give me a chance again.If there’s any other information you need, please feel free to contact us.

Of course, the above is only a rough template. You can also focus on what measures you have taken to prevent infringement in the future. The more detailed and comprehensive, the more you can reflect the seller’s attention to infringement.

In fact, the method and thinking of appealing trademark infringement is simple, but it is not easy to unseal the account. In addition to the complaints mentioned in this article, if the owner of intellectual property has taken your store to court, you need to settle or respond to the lawsuit to complete the unsealing. If you have related needs, you can consult us at any time.

Thank you for reading, and today’s sharing is over. Maijia Support will continue to bring you the latest infringement news. For more exciting content, you can pay attention to the WeChat public platform-“Maijia Support”, and immediately check the latest trend of your US case, whether it is a default judgment and other sellers’ settlement and counterclaims (real-time synchronization of US judicial case system data). If a seller whose funds are frozen needs legal assistance in litigation and settlement, you can contact us on WeChat WeChat official account, and we will provide you with the best legal consulting service.