From The Wall Street Journal:
Amazon.com Inc. is starting to let brand owners delete listings on its site for products they deem fake, marking a sharp shift in its struggle to fight counterfeiters that cedes some of its responsibility to other companies.
The online retail giant on Thursday launched a new anticounterfeiting program, called Project Zero, that it says would better protect brands from scammers by letting them designate listings for removal, rather than going through a cumbersome reporting process with Amazon. The company has been testing it with roughly 15 brands for a few months, and will now start inviting selected additional companies to participate. Amazon said it wants all brand owners to join the program eventually but declined to specify a timeline.
As part of Project Zero, Amazon also is including a tool that generates a unique code for each product unit that the brand can print onto existing packaging or attach onto items using a sticker. The codes can then be scanned to ensure a product’s authenticity when it enters an Amazon warehouse. Amazon said its engineers also are working to better train the algorithms that automatically scan, block and scrub the site of suspect listings.
In shifting some monitoring duties and authority to brands themselves, Amazon is taking an unusual step. Other tech companies use outside contractors to help monitor their platforms but don’t generally let users remove content. Amazon, for example, has required brand owners to report suspected counterfeits to an internal team that would investigate and decide whether or not to remove them.
“We realize we’re not perfect,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of world-wide customer trust and partner support. “It really puts the power in the brands’ hands.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
I hope Epson is included in this program. The chances of getting bogus Epson inkjet cartridges that won’t work in your printer is so high, I’ve taken to ordering direct from the Epson site.
The fix for that is to not use Epson.
And if you do a lot of printing may I suggest a laser printer? It’ll pay for itself quickly as the toner goes a lot further and is cheaper. Got one for my mom as a Christmas gift and showed her how to switch between that and her inkjet. My dad told me later that not having to hand feed it paper sold her on the beast – so much so that the ink cartridge had dried out by the next time she thought to use it – he got her a color laser for her birthday … (if you do need color get one with separate color toners rather than one big one.)
Yes, two lasers sounds like overkill, but if 99% of what you need is B&W then the larger toner cartridge is worth it.
MYMV and your prints not stop in the middle because you need to feed it more paper …
As products, so books? Can plagiarized authors designate a knock-off of one of their titles as bogus as well?
Just so long as they will also kick any authors making false claims to the curb …
That’s the problem with the DCMA – no kickback for false claims.