Amazon and Canon file joint lawsuit to protect customers and hold counterfeiters accountable

Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) and Canon Inc. have filed a joint lawsuit against a group of bad actors that attempted to advertise, market, and sell camera batteries and chargers in the Amazon store, with alleged infringement of Canon’s registered trademarks.

When Amazon detected the attempted abuse, the company worked with Canon to confirm the products in question were counterfeits and acted quickly to shut down the 29 selling accounts operated by the defendants.

An authentic Canon charger.

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Since its founding in 1937, the Canon brand has been synonymous with quality. The company is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions, but many customers may be most familiar with Canon’s industry-leading cameras. Many of those cameras are sold in the Amazon store, along with associated accessories, chargers, and batteries.

Canon has a strong track record of protecting its customers by educating them on how to spot counterfeit products. Canon also takes aggressive and necessary actions to crack down on counterfeiting. Learn more about the company’s work against counterfeiters.

Amazon shares Canon’s commitment to addressing the industry-wide issue of counterfeiting, and we are pleased to collaborate with the iconic camera brand.

Through our continued investment in advanced machine learning techniques, we have improved our proactive controls, automating and broadening our intellectual property protection and counterfeit detection systems. In 2022, our automated technologies scanned over 8 billion daily attempted changes to product detail pages for signs of potential abuse, resulting in our tools blocking or removing more than 99% of suspected fraudulent listings without brands ever even needing to report the abuse.

In the rare instances that counterfeits enter the Amazon store, we use feedback from customers, brands, and others to remove those products from our store, continuously improve our systems, and work closely with brands and law enforcement across the globe to hold the bad actors accountable. In the past year, Amazon's CCU sued or referred for investigation over 1,300 criminals in the U.S., the UK, across the EU, and in China. The Amazon team also seized and appropriately disposed of over 6 million counterfeit products, preventing them from being resold anywhere in the supply chain.

Instrumental to our success are the tools we provide brands to help protect and grow their brands. Canon is enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry and Project Zero, both of which are brand protection tools that aided Canon and Amazon in identifying the counterfeits in the Amazon store.

“To protect our customers and the authenticity of products in our store we help hold counterfeiters accountable through the courts,” said Kebharu Smith, director of Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit. “We have forged strong relationships with brands like Canon demonstrating that our anti-counterfeiting efforts are more effective when we work together.”

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington under the case number: 2:23-cv-00679

Amazon is dedicated to preventing counterfeits from ever reaching customers or being sold elsewhere in the supply chain. We have established a reputation as a global partner to brands in the fight against counterfeit through providing intelligence to law enforcement, aggressive enforcement actions, and the removal of illegal products from the Amazon store and beyond. Learn more about Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit’s previous actions: