Resolving Copyright Complaints & Winning Reinstatements on Amazon w/ Pre-Arbitration Letters
Okay, Amazon sellers today, I’m really going to try and teach you something that many of you don’t know. And unless you are really helping with thousands of reinstatements every year, you would never come across this…
We’re working on a case for a client where their listing was down, not their entire account, just their listing, because of a copyright complaint.
I’m not going to address the validity of the copyright complaint, but their listing is down, because someone claimed that they owned the picture or the verbiage. It was a copyright complaint. So the normal thing you would do is to do a Digital Millennium Copyright Act counter notice. Only Amazon for the past year or so has had significant issues or you have had significant issues filing DMCA counter notices. So anyway, Amazon’s system wasn’t accepting the counter notices and the way that we won the reinstatement of this seller’s killer listing is by drafting and serving what we call a pre-arbitration letter.
We have such a great working relationship with Amazon’s outside council that we can serve what we call a pre-arbitration letter, which basically says, dear Amazon’s lawyer, if we don’t resolve this, we are going to file an expensive prolonged arbitration against you. So please get another set of eyes on this issue, bring it to your office, bring it to the people you work with at Amazon, and let’s try and resolve this. And guess what, we resolved it without ever filing for the arbitration and this awesome seller’s listing was reinstated.
The people on my team that worked on this was my awesome partner, Anthony Famularo, and also one of our senior paralegals, Ashley. So Anthony, Ashley, great job. Amazon sellers, make sure you know what a counter notice is. And please like this video, share this video. And if you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to contact us.