Copyright Infringement
I’m an artist creating original artwork which I sell as posters, prints and on clothing products.
I have found several other sellers on Amazon who are using my artwork to sell on their own products. They do not own the artwork or have permission to do this and now I am effectively competing against myself.
Does anyone know of contact details (physical or email address) for the Amazon legal team so that I can issue cease and desist letters and have such products removed from amazon?
I have attempted to complain about this issue via https://www.amazon.co.uk/report/infringement however, have been given the response that, unless I purchase the items in question, my claim of infringement can not be validated. This is ridiculous. I refuse to put money in the hands of these people, buying items using my copyrighted work just to prove a point which is already self evident.
Many thanks
7 replies
Seller_h0sqqERPtekIE
I have a similar issue as you wirh regards to my artwork being constantly ripped off, generally by Chinese companies. In the last 5 years I have had over 80,000 products removed!
Using the Infringement notice form can sometimes be a bit hit and miss until you nail down the exact way that Amazon require you to complete it. Even then there are the odd occasions when the notice is rejected by them in error (for example they confuse it with a trademark notification).
For me the following works 99% of the time when completing the form…
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Click Rights Owner
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primary complaint is: COPYRIGHT CONCERNS - UNAUTHORIZED USE OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL…
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specific concern: THE PHYSICAL PRODUCT OF ITS PACKAGING INCLUDES UNAUTHORIZED COPYRIGHTED CONTENT OR IMAGES WITHOUT BEING PIRATED
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Name of brand: your business name, or your artist name
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Always provide a LINK to an example showing your artwork rather than the a written description if possible.
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Additional information. This is what i put…
THIS IS A COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT CLAIM. This is NOT a trademark infringement claim. The manufacturers of these products are illegally reproducing my intellectual property on this product. The products feature artworks of which I am the artist and copyright holder. The use of my artworks on these products infringes my COPYRIGHT. I have not licensed or given permission for my intellectual property to appear on these products. Therefore these physical products include unauthorised copyright images. As a result these products infringe my copyright under International Law and I require that they are immediately removed.
Then the rest of the form is pretty standard information
Hope that is of some help and good luck against the theives!
Seller_ZjZ4slOF0jHpk
Incidentally, how did you find out about the copyright thieves?
I do landscape photography and use the likes of Pixsy who search for matches to my work on the web. They’re not great with the number of images you can add (and I haven’t had the time to properly spend with it). But they have found quite a few sites using my work and even some selling canvas prints (how?) of my work. Unfortunately, they’re limited in the countries they can legally chase folks. And those tend to be the usual suspects - China, Russia, Romania, etc.
For others, they’ve helped in takedown notices and quite a bit of $$ for me from the infringers.
Just wondered, as well as getting Amazon to do something, there may be an agency out there who could take it even further with financial penalties for the infringers and some recompense for yourself. If it’s China, probably not. But might be worth a quick search.
Seller_h0sqqERPtekIE
I’ve bookmarked all the search terms where my artworks usually appear and check them twice a week, sorting by “newest Arrivals” so I pick up the new ones.
Then when I find a listing, I’ll search within the sellers products directly as well, as they usually have a number of my other artworks they’ve copied.
What I’ll then do is NOT report them all in one go for each seller, but spread it out over a few days. This tends to get them suspended more easily. If you report 5 items in one go on the same day for the same seller they usually don’t get suspended. But report 1 item every day over a week and they often have their account closed.
There doesn’t appear to be a hard and fast rule, for example three strikes and you’re out, but Amazon appears to take a harsher view if you continue to get notices after you have already been warned on previous occasions.
A word of note, now that the UK is out of Europe it appears that successfully removing something from the UK site no longer automatically removes it from the European sites (and visa/versa) - sometimes yes, sometimes no. I keep a record of each ASIN and then go back and do another report via a European site. Might seem like extra work but in my mind it’s another strike for the seller so they hopefully get closed down sooner.
If you find stuff being sold on other sites and a takedown notice has no effect, as long as the site is hosted somewhere in Europe / N America then you can send a DMCA notice to the host - for example if a website is on GoDaddy servers you can send a DMCA notice with the URL etc to GoDaddy and they will remove/block the page. Most hosts have DMCA takedown forms on their sites, though it does sometimes require a bit of investigation with WHOIS etc to find who is physically hosting the site.
80,000 and counting! There was a time about 4-5 years ago when my artworks starting appearing on phone cases. The sellers (about 10 of them) would be listing 100s every day featuring my artwork. Fortunately I didn’t have to do a takedown notice for each of those 80,000, that would have been madness. I would usually do 4 or 5 complaints and the seller would get shut down. The sellers mistake was to then just relist again minus the 5 I had complained about. So I just complained about another 5, got them shut down again and so on. Went on like that for almost a year before the sellers realised they were not going to win.
Now I usually only do about 10-20 takedown notices each week.
Best of luck to all in taking down the thieves…
