How to Remove Baseless Copyright Complaints with DMCA Counter Notices
If you’ve received a copyright complaint against your Amazon account, this is information you need to know.
First, as a law firm, we are intimately familiar with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and nobody out there who claims to be able to help Amazon sellers, who is not a lawyer, should have anything to do with copyright complaints, trademark complaints, patent complaints, or trade dress. This is all intellectual property law, it’s all under rights owner issues, and no one without a legal degree, admitted to practice law in a federal court, should be messing around with any of these issues that Amazon sellers face, every day.
When it comes specifically to copyright complaints, there’s a body of law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Under that law, you, as the recipient of that complaint, have the right to file what’s called a counter notice. A counter notice basically tells the person or the company that made the complaint that they need to either put up or shut up.
They can either start litigation against you in a federal court, or their complaint goes away. It disappears, it’s removed from your Amazon account. You go back on the listing, you go back to selling, it’s as if the complaint never occurred.
The downside of serving a Digital Millennium Copyright Act is that the brand may actually choose to file a lawsuit against you.
Filing lawsuits is more prevalent if you are a domestic seller, rather than a seller located outside the United States. The litigation that brands may file is also more prevalent against larger sellers who have assets, rather than smaller sellers, where the brands have no place to collect. Most lawyers won’t tell you this, but it is never worth suing somebody unless you can actually recover something. Sometimes that something is stopping sales, but more likely than not, when a lawyer starts a lawsuit, their client wants to recover money.
If you are outside the United States, it’s very difficult for a court in the United States to issue an order that means anything to you.
Even if the lawyer in the United States wins the lawsuit, and gets a judgment against you, that judgment then has to be brought to your home country where your assets are located. There’s an exception to this, that if you have assets in the United States, specifically assets at Amazon, that judgment, that order, can be used to grab your money or your inventory that’s within the United States, within Amazon’s warehouses. But if you think about it a bit, Amazon is usually only holding, at most, two weeks worth of your money. So what can that company actually win? I’m not telling anybody to needlessly poke a bear, or needlessly instigate litigation against them, but I want you to know the power that counter notices have.
If you’re an Amazon seller and the copyright complaint is bogus, or that brand has no way of touching you based upon your location, or your lack of assets, then a Digital Millennium Copyright Act counter notice may be a great tool that you can use, to get rid of copyright complaints against your Amazon account.
If you want to learn more about how we remove baseless copyright complaints asserted against sellers, contact us for a free consultation 1-877-9-SELLER
I want every Amazon seller to know that we are almost 40 people strong now, our entire team is devoted solely to helping Amazon sellers in the United States and all over the world.