How to deal with Amazon intellectual property protection in 2024?

As a seller on Amazon, maintaining compliance with the platform's extensive product policies is crucial for ensuring customer safety, protecting your account, and fostering a positive brand image. These policies encompass a broad spectrum of requirements, from product safety and labeling to product description accuracy and intellectual property protection. However, receiving these Intellectual Property complaints brings a number of problems that can end up suspending the account.

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How to find out if your Amazon seller account has received any Intellectual Property Complaints?

1. Go to the Amazon Seller Central website.
2. Sign in to your Amazon Seller account.
3. Click on the "Performance" tab.
4. Select "Account Health" from the left-hand menu.
5. If your have received any Intellectual Property Complaints you will have a number with an exclamation mark next to the Intellectual Property Violations and Complaints.
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What are the types of Amazon Intellectual Property (IP) Protection and how to solve them?

Generally, Amazon deals with 3 types of intellectual property rights and these are Trademark, Copyright and Patent. Trademark is the use of a particular brand name or its symbol. Copyright protects the creator of their work, on Amazon it is most often images. Patents are situations, the inventor prevents others from making, using or selling the invention. On Amazon, patents are then divided into design patent or functionality patent.

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Amazon further divides Intellectual Property Protection into two groups:
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Suspected Intellectual Property (IP) Violation

A suspected intellectual property (IP) complaint is a notice from Amazon that they have identified your listing as potentially violating the intellectual property rights of another seller or brand owner. These complaints are not initiated by the right owner directly, but rather by Amazon themselves.There are several reasons why your listing might be flagged as a potential IP infringement. Some common reasons include:

• Using a trademarked name or logo without permission

• Using a copyrighted image without permission

• Selling a counterfeit product

• Using a product description that is too similar to another seller's description

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💡 Common problems include the use of designs with well-known animated characters or the use of the phrase "compatible with the X brand".

✅ Solution

If you're just a reseller or dropshipper, you probably didn't even do listing of these products. Amazon automatically suspended this product in your catalogue and says it will then automatically disappear within 180 days. You shouldn't be at any additional risk, but if you have more of these suspended products, your account may be suspended as well. Therefore, you need to:

• Delete the product from your catalogue
• File an appeal for this product, stating that the product has already been deleted and asking for removal notice from Account health
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Received Intellectual Property (IP) Complaints

Unlike the first type of Intellectual Property, these are cases where your product is reported as infringing IP directly by the brand owner, by filling out an Amazon form. Unfortunately, this often results in irregular reporting - Amazon tends to give an advantage to the brand owner as the alleged rights holder and you need to take steps to protect yourself. If this is the first time you receive such a claim, your account will most likely not be suspended. In most cases, this will result in the ASIN being deactivated. However, if you experience multiple IP violations, you risk account suspension. And if it happens, you need to resolve the situation based on steps below.

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✅ Solution

Solution can be divided according to the type of complaint you receive:
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Parallel import - it’s a situation where the products are supplied to you by an intermediate party other than the official brand owner.

You need to upload an official invoice from the supplier with these parameters:

• The invoice should reflect your sales volume for the last 365 days. (since the time of suspending/reporting)
• Contact information for both the supplier and customer must be visible, including name, phone number, address or email address.
• You may remove the pricing information, but the rest of the document must be visible.
• Amazon will contact the supplier who must confirm the supply chain in some cases the supply chain must be described when requested by Amazon.
• It must include the purchase of at least 10 or more products.
• Highlight the product marker directly in the PDF or circle the products under consideration.
• Products must contain some information that are in amazon either: SKU,EAN, or product name.
• Ideally in AJ language

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Unauthorized Distribution and Patent infringement - it's a situation where the brand owner claims that your selling is Unauthorized Distribution.
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You have 2 type of solutions:

• Submit LOA (Letter of authorization) from Brand owner: The LOA will be sent by the Brand owner or the exclusive distributor directly to the seller, the LOA must contain a signed assignment of the rights to sell the product directly to the seller's company.
• Retraction from Brand owner: You contact the owner of the brand with asking if they can remove the claim. From our experience 50% of cases, the owner does not remote the claim. But it’s always to better try it.
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Unfounded complaint:

Unfortunately, not always the complaint filed is justified and even then Amazon will suspended your account or product. It’s unfortunately become quite common that some sellers file unfounded IP complaints against other sellers to try and get their listings taken down. Amazon takes a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to IP complaints so even if the claim is completely baseless and is eventually proved as such, it’s likely that the seller who was the target of the complaint will still suffer financial loss by way of having their listings removed temporarily or their account suspended.
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A common reason is that the complaint via Amazon is not filed by the actual brand itself, but by someone third party. To verify the actual owner of a trademark or patent,  use the following pages

• Unites states patent and trademark office
• European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO)
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The disbursements process can be complicated and protracted. Be patient, provide as many details as possible and don't forget to follow up the appeals.

If you struggling with the reinstatement on our own, as a team of experts we offer an Amazon account reinstatement service.