• We launched Brand Registry, a service that gives rights owners advanced tools to protect their brands. These tools include powerful text- and image-based search capabilities and automated protections that use machine learning to predict and prevent future defects. Brands also receive greater influence over their product detail pages—so brands can ensure product information is accurate and customers can make confident, informed purchasing decisions on Amazon.
• We publicly launched Transparency in the US, an item-level tracing service that helps brands proactively identify and prevent counterfeits from reaching customers. Transparency enables brands to assign a secure, unique, alphanumeric code to every product unit that a brand manufactures. The information is then used to authenticate the products. Amazon looks for and scans these codes within its fulfillment centers to ensure that only authentic products are shipped out to customers. Additionally, customers can use the Amazon shopping app or the Transparency app from their mobile phone to authenticate their products regardless of where they purchase. This is a transformational service for IP rights owners to protect their customers and fight counterfeits.
• We have more than 130,000 brands around the world registered in Brand Registry.
• As a result of the proactive and preventative systems we’ve put in place, 99% of all Amazon page views by our customers landed on pages that did not receive a notice of potential infringement.
• 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.
• Over 2,000 brands (from Fortune 500 companies to new startups) have enrolled in Transparency.
• We continue to work with government agencies and law enforcement worldwide to hold criminals accountable, and we’ve worked with brands to litigate directly against bad actors.
• We regularly engage and collaborate with a number of industry groups, including the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), Union des Fabricants (UNIFAB), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council (A2C2), and the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC).
• We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), an industry organization that builds bridges between industries to protect IP rights. Together, we continue to work with member brands to assess potential infringement and help drive enforcement against bad actors. As a result of our collaboration, we launched a program to identify opportunities for improvement and educate Brands on our notice and takedown processes.
• 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, 95.5% of listings removed by the collective marketplace signatories were done so through proactive measures; Amazon came in significantly higher than the aggregate.
