Although online marketplaces like Amazon provide brands unprecedented growth opportunities, they also give a similar advantage to brand competitors and unauthorized sellers by offering an inexpensive and easy forum to market copycat, competitive, counterfeit, and grey market products. Today, more than ever, these platforms define success or failure for an e-commerce or direct-to-consumer (DTC) business.
Today, more than ever, these marketplace platforms define success or failure for an e-commerce or direct-to-consumer business. Although online marketplaces like Amazon provide brands unprecedented growth opportunities, they also give a similar advantage to brand competitors and unauthorized sellers by offering an inexpensive and easy forum to market copycat, competitive, counterfeit, and grey-market products.
To protect legitimate brands, these marketplaces started to put in place IP protection services. Amazon is at the forefront of these initiatives. Amazon Brand Registry and trademark infringement allow eligible sellers to sign up to Amazon Brand Registry by providing details of their active, registered trademark(s) along with other product information such as where the products are shipped from. This information is used by Amazon to remove suspected infringing content automatically. For example, if a product which uses a company’s trademark is sent from a country which has not been listed by the company, the product listing is automatically removed. Amazon also offers patent, design and copyright infringement. This service goes a step beyond trademark infringement. Amazon also provides a simple form to report patent, design and copyright violation, which Amazon again reviews before taking the appropriate action.
Chinese marketplace also starts to warm up to the need to protect its sellers IP. Such as Alipay who recently unveiled its new digital copyright services platform powered by [AntChain]{https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201022005573/en/Ant-Group-Unveils-Digital-Copyright-Services-Platform-Powered-by-AntChain}, the company’s blockchain-based technology. This service use blockchain and AI technologies enabling content creators to quickly authenticate and verify original works such as music scores, videos, images, and articles and essays. Creator can uploads his or her work onto the platform, which will generate a unique digital copyright certification containing necessary information about the work after verifying that the content has not been previously submitted. These tamper-proof certifications can be used as evidence in copyright infringement and tort cases.
October 31, 2020