As a brand manager, you need to know how brand protection is done.

Today, I’m talking about authorization agreements and how Amazon treats them accordingly.

When it comes to authorization agreements and Amazon, Amazon does not respect them at all.

You may know this. What you may not know is something that is entirely disturbing, and it’s something that I learned myself when I was cross-examining one of Amazon’s executives during an arbitration.

What the executive testified about these agreements is absolutely mind-blowing…

The training that Amazon staff gets in India, the people that read the Amazon intellectual property complaints, are taught that if the word ‘authorization’ or ‘distribution’ appears in the complaint, they should disregard it entirely.

Nevertheless, that sounds absolutely ludicrous because it is absolutely ludicrous.

The team in India is specifically called the MPA team, whereas their training is minimal at best. Furthermore, there are no lawyers / paralegals supervising their work.

One of their bits of training is to take a complaint and if it has the word authorization / distribution, to ignore the complaint in its entirety, even if the rest of the complaint is claiming counterfeit.

Nevertheless, even if it is outside the first sale doctrine and all these other mechanisms that should hold weight when someone is evaluating one of your complaints, this will get thrown in the trash.