You can get fined for selling counterfeit goods, and apparently if you sell through Amazon you can get fined for it even though the goods were put in Amazon's warehouse by some other merchant.

For medical and safety gear, a fine is not good enough. This is intentionally putting people in danger.

The people sit in China, Japan, Malaysia and God knows where else and laugh there ass of at this "stupid money"

Legislation is already weak there. International legislation is none existened..

Sorry, but on. The people responsible sit in Seattle, Washington. I didn't ordered anything from a random guy in China, Japan, Malaysia or God knows where else. I have ordered a thing from a respectable looking, USA business.

Well, but in some cases you did. Many, many items on Amazon are not sold by Amazon. Quite a lot of Amazon's business these days is just acting as a marketplace for independent sellers. This is how they keep an arm's length ("plausible deniability") from the problem. I agree, however, that it doesn't absolve them of responsibility.

But the issue here seems to be that even if you order directly from Amazon or a reputable seller, you could still end up with a product coming from a less reputable seller if it has the same barcode.

The problem here is Amazon making it ridiculously easy for people outside of our legislatures reach to commit crimes. So, the logical option is to punish Amazon (and similar companies) for distribution of counterfeits.

Is it legal what Amazon is doing (or rather, not doing)? Well, make it illegal.

No, it's not legal to sell counterfeit goods. Amazon could already be punished if there was the (political) will to do so.

IANAL, but I am not sure if they're legally selling counterfeits, or if they're even (legally speaking) involved with any crime at all. Maybe (to the law) they're victims as well? Common sense tells me: Yeah, what Amazon is doing should be considered criminal activity. But common sense and laws sometimes tend to disagree.

Anyhow, I think generally we agree: Amazon should be punished for this. If the legal framework does not allow for this, it needs to be adjusted accordingly.

They sell illegal goods. Yes, I'd say they're doing something illegal. Now the illegal goods happen to be supplied by other people without Amazon's knowledge, but Amazon is still the one selling them, and they have a duty to know what they're selling. And once they know that some of their suppliers are selling them illegal goods, they have a responsibility to do everything they can to stop that and prevent it from ever happening again. Instead, they choose to describe it as not a big problem.

IIRC they use the defense of just offering a marketplace where other vendors sell stuff. That did not work for places like Silk Road, and given that Amazon handles the delivery I doubt it holds up - at least not in all legislations Amazon is active in.

This is the same bullshit companies like Airbnb and Uber try to pull.

No, the people sit in the Amazon offices. If you sell stolen goods you're lucky if you aren't charged with fencing but you can bet you won't be reimbursed if those goods get claimed. If you sell fake products, you should be held accountable just the same.

Sure, pass the buck up the chain but this should never allow the consumer to be knowingly harmed by an intermediary knowingly enabling the sale of counterfeit items with no accountability.´

Amazon is knowingly allowing fraud to happen. It's a risk they're willing to take and they can get away with it because there's no legal accountability. They could try to curb it but that would impact the bottom line. The only way to fix this is regulation (i.e. laws) and more consistent application of it.

The market can't fix it because there's no market incentive to fix it.

Yes, Amazon has had ample opportunity to self-regulate, and they are passing on it because--contrary to outdated theories--it's been more profitable to ignore the problem.

I'm probably too much of an adult to be quoting Fight Club but this reminds me of that infamous monologue about car companies comparing the cost of a recall vs the cost of lawsuits from faulty cars that kill their customers.

I'm not sure what you're calling outdated but it's been like this at least since whenever that book was written. The only thing that has changed is that consumer rights have been eroded in the US over decades, reducing the financial risk of inaction.

People may do something out of the kindness of their hearts. Corporations only do what is either directly profitable or inevitable. Expecting a corporation to do something because it is "right" is absurd. Corporations -- contrary to US legal opinion -- aren't people.

What do you mean? There was no problem charging Assange, not an US citizen, with crimes.

It took seven years and well over £10 million in police costs to get him, and that's from the territory of one of our strongest allies with an extradition treaty.

We don't even have an extradition treaty with China.

Until he was kicked out, Assange was technically in Ecuador's territory, not UK.

From one and only reason - because Ecuador helped him. The minute he left the embassy, he was taken, and that would've happened 7 years ago if it wasn't for Ecuador. The average Joe is not going to have help from foreign governments and their diplomats.

It's even worse if you're trying to get a Chinese national out of China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_China

> China does not allow for the extradition of its own nationals.

Confining a person to China is a punishment by itself

Let me check I understand this correctly: You could be a seller of genuine articles, but could be fined if Amazon substitutes a fake supplied by someone else?

It reminds me of the case where someone got in trouble with customs because Amazon substituted a counterfeit for the genuine article he ordered and paid for.

Yep. Amazon offers a service where items with the same SKU from multiple vendors are intermingled at their warehouses. This is no problem as long as they are really the same item.

But clearly when they mix up real items with fake ones, it's Amazon and the fake vendor that are at fault and need to be held responsible, not the real vendor or the customer.

It's bizarro world.

All the investigator sees is that someone went to a website with your name on it, bought product X, and received a counterfeit of product X instead. It doesn't matter how that happened; all that matters is that your business enables counterfeit goods to find a market. Of course if you run a business that sells via Amazon you have to specifically opt out of this inventory mixing, even though it increases your costs. Either that or you shouldn't do business via Amazon at all, or you should gang together with other businesses and force Amazon to change it's operations. But no matter what you do it's likely to increase your costs.

It's not clear to me whether this problem is present in the EU, where consumer law generally works a lot better. A poster below mentions fake CE logos?