| jeffweico | 01-20-2016 06:11 PM |
Re: Anyone got a notification of legal action from Amazon?
In a small claims court in the US, the rules are more informal than they would be in a regular court and many people represent themselves. Yes, it is also less expensive than filing a regular lawsuit. However, you still need to know what you are doing.
In the case of taking Amazon to court, you would be asking the court for Amazon to release your inventory and your money. Amazon will claim that your inventory is counterfeit and that the agreement you made with them when you became a seller was that they could seize any counterfeit merchandise and confiscate your earning from that merchandise.
And then what?
You have to know how to respond, to claim that the contract between you and Amazon is invalid because it breaks a specific law. You can't just tell the judge "it isn't fair!" - courts are there to decide what is legal, not what is fair. Fairness has nothing to do with it.
You could also try to provide evidence to the court that your merchandise was authentic. If you have receipts from an authorized supplier, then you should prevail. But they will most likely check with the brand owner to make sure that the supplier actually IS authorized and then check with the supplier to make sure that you really ARE their customer. And even then, there are no guarantees.
Amazon has attorneys that are full time Amazon employees. They also have business attorneys on retainer everywhere they do business. It is unlikely that Amazon decided on it's own that they could do this and get away with it. They most likely had several attorneys look at their policy and the steps they take to enforce it and the attorney's signed off on it. That is how corporations work.
And you had better be sure that the merchandise IS authentic, because their attorneys and/or the judge may decide to turn it over to the local prosecutor in your area and a criminal case could be filed against you. Of course, in a criminal case, the rules change a bit, they have to prove that the merchandise was counterfeit and (at least in the US) that you either knew it was counterfeit or that you SHOULD HAVE known it was counterfeit. For example, the prosecutor would try to make the case that a reasonable person should have known that a real Rolex would not wholesale for $125 and would not have "MADE IN CHINA" stamped on the back of it.
And all of that assumes that you are talking about a REAL Amazon account in your REAL NAME with your REAL information. Because I am reasonably certain that Amazon also has a clause in their agreement that favors them heavily if the information given to them is false in any way. It may not break the law to lie to Amazon, but it is definitely against their rules.
The fact that nobody, or few people, have won these cases before has nothing to do with how well "connected" the attorney is. In court, connections only matter when there is a decision that could go either way. Then the judge, who might be a personal friend of the attorney, might be inclined to support them. Because judges have to write opinions in each case they decide explaining their decision. So, they cannot ignore the law just because an attorney is connected to someone in some way. It just does not work like that. | 
