This logic assumes that it's cheap to get a trademark, whereas the parent says it'll cost $2000.

This leaves small hobby stores like Cliff's with no practical defense against scams like this if they've only made a few thousand in profits through amazon sales, especially if they don't have that cash on hand (and suddenly lose their amazon revenue stream!)

Like it's easy to say "well you should have trademarked your product" after the fact, but very few people have even heard of this scam when it happens to them.

It's interesting that you say "some due diligence is required" and go on to put the burden of that diligence on Cliff, rather than the creator of the marketplace.

It should be pointed out that in a country like India or China it IS often the marketplaces legal responsibility to prevent counterfeit merchandise from being sold in their market. If you go into many malls for example there are signs up on the walls with a hotline to report people selling counterfeit merchandise. In India, they have a service you can contact that enforces returns/refunds of any counterfeit item that you purchase from a vendor (though usually mentioning the hotline and threatening to call it is more than enough to convince the vendor to give you a refund).

The solution is for Amazon to be less horrid.

There really are no polite words to describe business practices.

Stop buying from Amazon. Quite easy actually.

Exactly, stop buying from Amazon.

There a software company running a software market, all the power is in there hands, and they choose to do nothing.

Why should anyone be able to seize anyone else's Amazon listing without thorough human review by an Amazon employee? This seems like it would be a non-issue on a sane platform.