How Amazon Broke the US Patent Office

Video written by Ben Doyle

[TheTexas]

Nothing says Amazon verified like a brand that has only capital letters, little to no vowels, and the description is likely written by a bot and/or direct Google Translate

[alhypo]

I love Amazon's approach to problem-solving.
1. There is no problem
2. Kids catch on fire
3. Ok, maybe there is a problem
4. Define the problem
5. Recognize that the problem is too hard to fix
6. Figure out a way to push the problem off on some unwitting government agency
7. Give executives bonuses

[jonzulanas]

I guarantee you, some employee was told to register a trademark and decided that whacking their head against the keyboard and submitting it was easier than trying to run anything by the marketing department.

[fortpatches]

There is a lot left out on the USPTO side. One thing you have to do when applying for a trademark is provide a specimen, usually in the form of an image with your trademark in use. They received many photoshopped images of specimens in filings.

The USPTO passed a rule in the federal register that applicants that are not US residents must apply through a US attorney for accountability purposes. Before, a foreign national could file as many applications as they wanted no matter the quality and they would have to go through processing with no recourse for fraud. No, there is an attorney they can go after for failure of due diligence.

One problem now is that we have found instances of foreign filers impersonating US attorneys. So new rules were introduced that for trademark filings, the attorney has to have a verified USPTO account. All this has gone on over the past three-ish years.

[PPschnuppe]

It usually goes like this:

- There's a factory in china producing some random product
- Dozens of traders try to source these products and sell them under their private label, so the products are 'unique' and they are the only one selling them (so they have the 'buy box')
- Some seller directly from china eventually takes over the listing anyway and undercuts prices
- The shipments usually get fulfilled directly by amazon, so they have all the information about manufacturing sites, sell numbers etc.
- Amazon takes over products that are selling well by sourcing them themselves and turning them into 'amazon basic' products. Now, no third party seller can compete anymore and amazon outsourced all the hard work and financial risk in finding viable products

[gladitsnotme]

You're nice for not telling us that 100% of these "companies" are just Chinese factories. They are the same people selling on aliexpress, wish, and temu.

[MrA]

Linus from LTT also explained how many of these companies use clothes to gather reviewes and stars and more, then changing the product to a tech product, that is in many cases a scam (see sd cards, ssds, usb sticks, mostly)

[ibrahimmahrir]

From using the US Postal Service to do its shipping for free, to using the US Patent and Trademark Office to do its vetting for free. Amazon is riding on the government offices coattails.

[Kevinjimtheone]

Amazon is terrible in every single way at this point. Terrible products, fake reviews, no support or just a bot answering the same way. And it's even worse if you are seller there.

[DarkLink]

You forgot to mention the part where Amazon takes any products doing well on its site and then tries to buy it. If they can't buy it they make a competitor and run the company out of business even if it causes them to take a temporary loss.

[scottmac]

I was trying to buy an alarm clock on Amazon just yesterday and literally gave up because it’s just the same 7 junk clocks over and over and over again under different made-up brand names

[jonas]

Its amazing how much worse the Amazon shopping experience has gotten over the years. Was trying to buy a massage gun a while ago and its basically the same exact product being sold by 100 different fake brands, descriptions and product photos might not even show or describe what youre buying, and then you need to quadruple check if its actually being sold by amazon or some random company with no reviews or a return policy.
But it probably makes them marginally more money than actually picking out real products and discarding the other 90%.

[oscillator]

I’m a trademark attorney, and this is…. actually pretty much spot on, well done

[xis]

Ten years ago, as it became apparent that Amazon would rocket itself to the front of the retail space, I never thought for one second that I'd find myself preferring to shop at Walmart

[johnnyboi]

I think it's hilarious that sometimes the fake companies will have promotional images on their listings with like people wearing "Asdfghjkl" brand merchandise. Like it's a normal thing. Like they live in a dimension where everyone knows that phonetic diarrhea by name and they all love it.

[GasparLewis]

Tired: ghost kitchens.
Wired: ghost companies.

[LongHairedTom]

How did Amazon expect the USPTO to “sift out” dangerous products? In this model they are just registering the company trademark - they won’t even see the products…

[Sal-T]

Also: Some of these 'companies' will sell simple products for a while, get lots of good reviews on those products, then change the product listing to something completely different. This has the effect of keeping all of the ratings and reviews, but now the product is a cheap thing that appears to be an expensive thing, has a high markup, but is garbage, and all of the ratings show a 4.5+ star rating. They make a bunch of these sales and then ship the garbage, then disappear when the bad ratings start coming in.

[nickwaters]

I found reasons to back to brick and mortar stores. It’s nice to just see and feel the darn packaging and peek in the box to make sure I’m getting top shelf Chinesium rather than the bottom of the barrel crap Amazon will slam against your front door in a soft package.

[therealinak]

And that’s why I went back to eBay after all these years. More likely to find name brand products, seller review system functions well, and because that review system functions so efficiently, shipping is usually significantly faster for me anyway.