Innovation is in our DNA and we’re proud to build tools and operate stores that help entrepreneurs share their big ideas with customers around the world. And when you’ve come up with a big idea, you want to protect it. That’s where trademarks, copyrights, and other intellectual property (IP) rights come in to play.
In 2017, 300,000 small and medium-sized businesses started selling through Amazon’s stores in the US alone; we are continually innovating to protect big ideas from these entrepreneurs—and all the businesses selling on Amazon.
Today is World Intellectual Property Day, and we thought we’d take the opportunity to give you a closer look at what we’ve been doing to protect IP rights and the customer experience on Amazon.
- We launched Brand Registry, a free service that gives rights owners advanced tools to protect their brand. This includes powerful text- and image-based search capabilities and automated protections that use machine learning to predict and prevent future issues. Brands also receive better control over the photos, videos, and other information about their brand on Amazon’s detail pages—so brands can ensure product information is accurate and customers can make confident, informed purchasing decisions on Amazon.
- We have more than 40,000 brands around the world registered in Brand Registry, and they’re finding and reporting 99% fewer suspected infringements than before the launch of Brand Registry.
- We created a global team of investigators that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to respond to and take action on notices of potential infringement. We treat these with urgency, and Amazon investigates and takes action on more than 95% of all notices of potential infringement received from Brand Registry within eight hours.
- As a result of the proactive and preventative systems we’ve put in place, 99.9% of all Amazon page views by our customers landed on pages that did not receive a notice of potential infringement.
- We continue to work with government agencies and law enforcement to hold criminals accountable, and we’ve worked with brands to litigate directly against bad actors.
- We take a global view to addressing these issues. For instance, in Europe, we joined a number of global consumer brands in a Memorandum of Understanding to share information that will help us collectively protect customers from counterfeit. According to the EU Commission, 97% of listings removed by the collective marketplace signatories were done so through proactive measures (vs. 86% in 2016).
We realize our work isn’t done, and today, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, an industry organization that builds bridges between industries to protect IP rights. Together, we’ll continue to work with member brands to assess potential infringement and help drive enforcement against bad actors.
Customers trust that they will receive authentic goods when they shop on Amazon and anything that diminishes that trust is unacceptable. We will continue to fight and innovate to protect our customers and help brands protect their innovations.
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