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(USGovernment-News.Com, March 14, 2014 ) Uxbridge, MA -- A successful seller on Amazon recently revealed a disturbing trend that all retailers on the site should be aware of. According to Ice Sphere Tech, the maker of a popular brand of ice ball molds, their product was hijacked by another seller who used the same image and same project description to copy their product and damage their sales efforts.
This problem can be explained by looking at how the development of products should work in a free market economy. The future of kitchenware, for example, is in the hands of the cool kitchen gadgets we see today. Every kitchen gadget is invented with the common goal of one day becoming one of the kitchen essentials. You know. That kitchenware that you cannot imagine living without. In one instance, a man named Alan MacMasters invented the toaster in 1893. At that time, the toaster was probably considered to be an inessential kitchen gadget. This was only true until the Crompton, Stephen J. Cook and Company took over the invention's progress. After a company was able to put money into the toaster's development, it became a staple in the modern kitchen. Just think about how often you have toast in the morning. The way a free market economy should work is easy. An invention leads to income, which leads to product development, which leads to more income, which leads to more development until the product is the best kitchen gadget available.
But this is only the way in which a free market economy "should" work. In order to make a gadget become an essential kitchen tool, the producer must make enough capital to continue production and developmental progress. The Internet has become a great marketing tool for new kitchen gadget stores, but the Internet is also an open space for anonymous counterfeiters. New kitchen gadgets and businesses are a very easy target for counterfeiters due to loopholes in counterfeit reporting procedures and their economically small voice.
Websites such as Amazon.com are not providing enough protection against these types of issues. The policies and procedures used to report violations should be direct, simple, and, most importantly, sustainable. Amazon in particular does not provide this type of service for reporting copyright infringement.
There are many occurrences in which a report is made on Amazon, but the report only leads to the removal of one seller or product page. This means that the violator could simply create another profile and continue selling the product illegally. This then leads to an endless amount of paperwork on the true developer's side because they need to continuously file another report for every occurrence of infringement. This type of counterfeiting is called "piggybacking".
Not only do the true owners of a product need to re-submit forms endlessly, they are also in the wake of a much more annoying type of piggybacking. By using a loophole in Amazon's infringement report procedure, piggy backers are allowed to submit the true developer's copyright information and, subsequently, report the true owner of the copyright. This clears the market of competition for the counterfeiters and they get to run away with a large sum of money while destroying honest competition. By the time the reports have been reversed and resubmitted, the counterfeiter has made plenty of money and the producer loses plenty of money and progress.
The time wasted on filling out reports, having their own page shut down, and bouncing back from being swindled is detrimental to a seller's performance. The produce does not get the reward for the effort that they put into creating a gadget that was thought to make the world a better place. Amazon has yet to fix this problem and has not been good about responding to the issues raised by the small businesses and sellers alike.
Please be aware of the problems that arise with the development and sale of products online. Until Amazon fixes the piggyback loophole in their copyright infringement reporting system, sellers are at risk of losing business and having their hard work hindered. Until this problem is fixed, technological progress as a whole is at risk.
About Ice Sphere Tech
The original Ice Sphere Tech ice ball mold under $20 on Amazon. High customer support with the trust of Amazon behind us.
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