Remember the deal Apple made with Amazon that killed all third party repair services and used Apple product sellers that aren’t specifically approved by Apple, thereby increasing prices for consumers sharply? Turns out the FTC isn’t too happy with this deal.
Last year, Amazon cut a deal with Apple to bring direct iPhone sales to its platform for the first time. Now, that deal is coming under scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, The Verge has learned.
Good. This deal is about as clear cut an example of monopolistic, anticompetitive behaviour as you can possibly get
This is not as clear cut as you think it is. Prior to this change there were a great number of misleading ads on Amazon tricking people into over paying for Apple products. For example one might advertise a Mac Book Air for $100 less than list, you buy it and think you are getting a decent deal. But when it arrives it is a Mac Book Air that was discontinued five years ago.. Many of these small vendors were purposely obfuscating what they were truly selling. They weren’t lying, but they sure weren’t making it clear that you were buying discontinued items.
jonsmirl,
If amazon was only targeting merchants with fraudulent advertising, that wouldn’t even be controversial. Take those down, great! The problem is amazon made a deal with apple to block all competing merchants of apple products without regards to whether the products are being sold in good faith, that is unethical and I certainly wouldn’t mind a judgment against both amazon and apple for harming legitimate merchants. I wouldn’t mind amazon adding an “authorized reseller” stamp for apple approved sellers, that’s what they should have done and consumers could do with that information what they will, but outright blocking sellers that don’t have apple’s blessing is abusive, that should not be allowed. I don’t know what the deal was between apple and amazon, but it must have been lucrative for both companies to subject themselves to potential antitrust actions.
Then again apple might have felt it had nothing to loose since I hear trump is a fan of Tim Apple.
/sarcasm
Apple purposely obfuscates their products too by making sure processor model numbers aren’t included in their stores or certified reseller’s advertisements. This is somewhat on them for creating a culture where that’s acceptable and you don’t know what you’re really getting under the hood.
This is happening across many brands, and the reasoning is (partially) understandable.
Several years ago I sold my older Logitech controllers on Amazon. This year, I received a copyright violation (or something like that) telling that I was selling counterfeit items (which I was not). It turns out the listing was open (even though product count was = 0) for so many years, and being a discontinued item, it was probably taken over by fakes. (Btw, customer service was not very helpful, and told me to just ignore the issue, and the negative mark would be deleted automatically in so many months).
I checked later, and many Logitech products cannot be sold on Amazon, unless you have a permit or work directly with a distributor. This is true for several other brands I looked up.
I think the customs are no longer able to keep up with fakes, which has become very sophisticated, and includes even product packaging, so they just cut off smaller sellers. And given my (single data point) experience, they don’t seem to care much about the collateral damage.
sukru,
It doubt it was a “copyright claim” in the case of your listing.
Nevertheless, youtube and other platforms kind of work that way, youtube automatically assumes the copyright claim is legitimate and takes away a video’s revenue regardless of whether or not it is infringing in legal terms. The onus is on the channel owner to fight the claim and if they don’t the default judgment is against them. It’s not necessarily right, but I think google/youtube do it this way because it’s much less work for them to assume claims are valid than to vet the legitimacy of individual claims.
I dug the email thread. It was “Listing removed Potential Trademark Misuse”. So it was not copyright, but trademark. It is still the same, the law of the land has “first sale doctrine”, and that right to resell items covers them both. However Amazon is currently preventing it due to abuse from fake products.
As I said, I can understand their reasoning, but I do not like it.
For YouTube, I really cannot comment.
sukru,
Well, if the product listing was legit, which I assume it was as you say, then the trademark misuse claim would probably not stand up to legal scrutiny since you did not actually misuse it. However the reality is that a little guy without a legal team is very easy to step on and ignore without consequence. It sucks, but the little guys usually loose.
I sympathies with how difficult it is to get customer support at times. Customer support is hollow for many large corporations these days. I use ebay to buy parts sometimes, and once I had an issue with a vendor who completely ignored me, which is rare, but the issue was that so did ebay themselves, haha. And it’s just about impossible to reach anyone in person. At least as a consumer I was protected by strong credit card laws that entitles us to charge-back transactions at the merchant’s expense. This in itself can be abused, but if I have literally no way to reach anyone responsible, I’m glad to have that ability.