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Navigating the Two Sides of Amazon's Take-Down Process

By Edward Weisz and Alanna Miller
May 01, 2019

It's no surprise that Amazon, one of the world's largest retailers for entertainment products, maintains its own process for managing infringement and counterfeit allegations. This process has opened up new strategies for asserting and defending infringement claims. In this article, we explain how copyright, trademark and patent infringement issues unfold on Amazon by describing the process for rights holders to report infringement, and the impact of successful infringement take-down requests. We also address the situation where an infringement dispute evolves into a lawsuit, the resulting personal jurisdiction and state law issues that may arise.

Whether Amazon investigators reviewing take-down requests are attorneys or have any background in intellectual property rights is unclear. The take-down mechanism allows rights owners to seek removal of allegedly infringing products from Amazon's website. The take-down request provides a rights owner with several drop-down choices and a space to identify the allegedly infringing product by listing the corresponding Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). The take-down request does not ask for information to identify the accused infringer or its location.

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