Strategies for dealing with copycat products?

[gamutpins]

Here’s what we’ve found so far. Basically, you need to report each copycat product listing you find in a different way, depending on the website:

• Alibaba (includes Alibaba, AliExpress, and Lazada) has its own IP Management & Submission page: https://ipp.alibabagroup.com/login.htm#/home
  If you can take down products on Alibaba, you might be cutting them off at the source!

• Amazon

  • Start with Amazon’s own IP Report Form: https://www.amazon.com/report/infringement
    Most likely that form will not be enough, but it’s the place to start.

  • Next (if needed), send an email to Amazon’s copyright folks at copyright@amazon.com
    Include all the items listed below and state in the email that you included them (literally say: “I am attaching an electronic signature of the person authorized …” and so on)

    • A physical (scan) or electronic signature (of you or a person authorized to work on copyright reporting)

    • A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed upon

    • A description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the site (AKA a link to the listing)

    • Your address, telephone number, and email address

    • A statement by you that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law

    • A statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice (your email) is accurate and that you are the copyright owner.

• DHGate (you will need to register before you can submit a report): http://brand.dhgate.com/usr/sign.do#hp1403-cs-3-b

• eBay is another can of worms, and we’re still learning about handling fraudulent listings there.

• Etsy gives you two choices for reporting:

  • Their classic IP report form (much easier to use): https://www.etsy.com/legal/ip/report

  • Their new Reporting Portal: https://www.etsy.com/ipreporting

• Joom - send an email to ipr@joom.com using the guidelines here: https://www.joom.com/en/ipr-protection#2.1

• Made In China (yes, it’s a website, and you will need to register before you can submit a report): https://sourcing.made-in-china.com/complaint/
  Like Alibaba, Made in China is a major source of copycat products. It seems that some re\sellers get their products in bulk here. If you can take down products on Made in China, you might be cutting them off at the source!

• Walmart - submit a claim at https://brandportal.walmart.com/ipservices

• Wish.com - submit a report here: https://merchant.wish.com/brand-protection/brand-violation-report

• Shopee - submit IP complaints using the portal (or email) for that company:

  • Mexico

  • Singapore

  • Malaysia

  • Thailand

  • Indonesia

  • Philippines

  • Brazil

  • Taiwan: send an email to help@support.shopee.tw

  • Chile

  • Vietnam

  • Colombia has a local and an English portal:

    • Local (Spanish)

    • English

• Shopify of course has it’s own tool if you find copycat listings here: https://help.shopify.com/en/legal/dmca

After reporting

We track of the URLs that we find and report so we can check back on them to make sure that the products really are gone. If nothing works, the next thing we do is contact the web host (you can find that through https://www.whois.com/ if it’s not obvious).

Does anyone else have good tips?

[PaulNewton]

You can use a visual montoring service like visualping.com to know when the listing has changed.

Though for marketplace situations there can be constant changes by the platform and not the copycat seller so there would be false positive notifications.

So you’d want the notifications to a specific email for when reviews happen.

Could also be useful for noting if seller behavior or tactics change after a complaint.

More complex roll your own with something like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io (python, apache2.0 license or https://github.com/huginn/huginn (ruby, mit license)

For proving content copying;

For images beyond just watermarking , there is steganography https://www.openstego.com/ .

For text there is copyright traps, specific misspellings, extra words, punctuation, formatting, missing words, zerowidth spaces etc.