Amazon Sellers’ IP Rights & Funds Stolen Leading to Pre-Arbitration Demand Letters
Hi. My name is Rebecca. I’m an associate attorney at Rosenbaum, Famularo & Segall, PC. I work with both the brand protection and arbitration teams.
Most recently, we have been preparing what is known as a pre-arbitration demand letter for a client who sells a variety of goods, including books, calendars, and DVDs on the Amazon platform.
This client has been dealing with their rightfully earned funds being either redirected to a different account or entirely withheld by Amazon. Our client has not realized any of the profits from the sales of their many items that they offer on Amazon. Our client never received the funds earned from the self-published book that they own. This product has been offered for sale on Amazon since 2006 in hard copy and since 2012 as an electronic version.
Our client later discovered that an account was created under her company name with what is called the Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Program. This program is Amazon’s ebook publishing unit, which launched in 2007, concurrently with the first Kindle product. Our client has never created an account with this program. It is their belief that the ebook funds were either redirected to this KDP account, which is not actually our client’s. The book also ranked at just below 2 million out of 8 million books sold on Amazon, and thus was on Amazon’s bestseller charts. The order performance metrics on our client’s seller account showed zero orders placed.
Oddly enough, our client never received any profits from these sales.
As for our client’s DVD, this product also ranked as an Amazon bestseller, around number 400,000 out of all movies and TV. Again, like with the book, our client received none of the rightfully earned funds or royalties from this product. Additionally, in regards to the DVD, Amazon removed this item from our client’s storefront and used the pictures on their own ad for the item.
Amazon began selling this product as their own.
Our client provided full proof that they were the rightful owner of this product and all associated intellectual property rights. But Amazon continued to sell the DVD as their own without any authorization by our client to do so.
We have been in the process of contacting Amazon on behalf of our client to help them get paid their rightfully earned funds from the astronomical sales of their various products.
If you’ve had funds stolen by Amazon, call us 1-877-9-SELLER for a free consultation.