Progress report
Commitment to customer and brand protection
Amazon strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where people can find and discover the widest possible selection of authentic goods. As a customer-focused company, we work hard to earn and maintain customer trust, and we strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit products. To maintain this trust, we invest tremendous resources as we constantly innovate and improve the ways we detect and prevent counterfeit products from reaching our customers. For the past three years, according to The Harris Poll, customers voted Amazon the #1 most reputable company. We are proud to share some of the latest innovations, data points, and collaborations to highlight what we’ve been doing to protect intellectual property rights and build customer trust within our stores.
Latest innovations
• 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.
Data points
• 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. We treat these notices with urgency, and Amazon investigates and takes action on more than 95% of all notices of potential infringement received from brands in Brand Registry within 24 hours.
• Over 2,000 brands (from Fortune 500 companies to new startups) have enrolled in Transparency.
Collaborations
• 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.
“Amazon streamlines our brand protection processes. Everything we need to monitor our brand is in one place. For us, it’s a one-stop-shop for brand protection on Amazon."
