They can and have, but they lose. Technically Amazon isn’t the seller, but simply the marketplace, according to courts so far.

There was a discussion of this on HN recently because a car company (Mercedes I think it was) caught Amazon itself selling fakes of their products.

Yet if I post a magnet link for a torrent, I'm distributing pirated software.

Make a lot of money and buy a newspaper. It won't be piracy for you after that.

No there is a huge difference. What Jeff Bezos is doing is SELLING pirated non-software. That's highly illegal and punishable, in most places, with jail time.

But man this is an insightful comment. Of course, that's what the outsourcing wave will lead to.

Pirated real products. From toothpaste to electronics. Lower quality ... and even higher quality products.

Man how could I have missed this ?

Amazon's legal situation might be worse than usual in this case, because the plagiarist was using CreateSpace. In the normal case, someone ships counterfeit goods to an Amazon warehouse and pays Amazon to manage them. But CreateSpace is a printing service, which means the infringing book was printed on an Amazon-owned printing press. So legal precedents that shield them from liability don't necessarily apply.

A number of counterfeit goods have been showing up in the "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com" category - so they are both the warehouse and the vendor. Not the pages where they're reselling stuff from random companies like Bob's Gadgets LLC.

What was the outcome of the fake Mercedes thing?

I believe it’s still in litigation, but people are saying that it’s the first time Amazon might lose.