In addition to data and policies, Xiaobian also really experienced the growing importance that everyone is paying to intellectual property rights and brands from questions from sellers on weekdays, and also heard about the challenges faced by everyone in protecting intellectual property rights in cross-border e-commerce:

Broadly speaking, intellectual property refers to the exclusive right of a natural person, legal person or other organization to enjoy the results of their intellectual creations in accordance with law. It is mainly reflected in three aspects:

a Definition: A trademark is a word, symbol, or design, or combination thereof (such as a brand name or logo) used by a company to identify its products or services and distinguish them from those of other companies. Generally speaking, trademark laws are designed to prevent buyers from being confused about the origin of the goods or services.

b Examples of trademark infringement: Typical trademark infringements include displaying other people's trademarks on detail pages or using “imitation” trademarks to mislead people.
For example:
A merchant uses the “amazonn” trademark to promote its products. This trademark is very similar to Amazon's registered trademark “Amazon,” which can easily cause confusion among consumers, and infringes on Amazon's trademark rights.

c How to apply for a trademark: Go to a trademark office in a different country or region to apply. The Amazon IP Accelerator Program also provides corresponding service providers, check it out at ipaccelerator.com.

a Definition: Copyright is intended to protect original works such as videos, movies, songs, books, musical works, video games, and paintings. If someone is the author of an original work, then they typically own the copyright in that work. To be protected by copyright, the work must have spiritual content and must be innovative to a certain extent.

b Examples of copyright infringement: Typical copyright infringements include image theft, copying product descriptions, or unauthorized use of works of art owned by others.
For example:
● Seller A copied the product image of Brand B to its product detail page to sell its own products, which infringes on Brand B's image copyright.
● Seller C went to a designer's website, took a screenshot of a cartoon image designed by someone else, changed the color scheme, and printed the pattern on his product. Simply modifying the color scheme of a cartoon image without authorization also has a very high risk of copyright infringement.

c How to apply for copyright: Generally speaking, creators own copyright for images, videos, images of their own design, etc. taken by themselves.

1. Put a watermark representing yourself or your company symbol (name, screen name, company logo, etc.) on the image to exercise your signature rights;
2. Save the time you upload your photos to the Amazon store to prove that you have prior rights to the images;
3. Modify and save the author information in the attributes of your own photography, and take a screenshot of the author information and generation time information to initially prove your authorship and the time the work was completed.

a Definition: A patent is a form of legal protection for an invention and is time-barred.

b Examples of patent infringement: application of another person's patented technology, design, etc. without permission from the patentee.
For example:
Amazon holds design patents for Amazon Echo speaker designs in several countries. During the validity period of Amazon's patent, manufacturing and selling other speakers with almost the same function as this speaker infringes on Amazon's patent rights.

It's not just “high tech” products that require patent protection!There are three main types of patents: inventions, utility model patents, and design patents. For example, clothing brand sellers should also pay attention to the protection of design patents for clothing styles exclusively designed by themselves to prevent the appearance of popular products from being imitated by other sellers.

You can't take it for granted!Intellectual property rights are clearly “territorial”. Influenced by the level of political, cultural, and economic development, there are many differences in the legislation, protection content, and level of protection of intellectual property rights in each country, and the scope of protection of their rights is only effective in that country.

Take trademark rights as an example. Specific applications:
1 Seller A has legal intellectual property rights for the products sold in China. When the product is sold to the US through Amazon's US site, it must have a registered trademark of the US Trademark Office to defend its rights.
2 After registering a trademark in the US, Seller A is preparing to expand the business to Amazon Japan. If you want to avoid trademark infringement in Japan, you also need to apply for trademark registration with the Japan Trademark Office.

Due to differences in brand protection policies in various countries and sites, sellers are advised to fully understand in advance, establish brand protection awareness during daily operations, and act quickly after discovering infringement to minimize the impact of infringement.

Many brands believe that dealing with overseas infringement requires huge legal and time costs.

The early global layout of trademarks and patents, as well as Amazon brand registration on multiple sites, provided a guarantee for the later development of the brand, and also enabled us to use Amazon's brand protection tools to defend our rights. After comprehensively using Amazon's brand protection tools, we have clearly noticed a decrease in infringement cases, and the cost of lawyers to defend our rights has also been relatively reduced.

Brand owners with overseas registered trademarks (TM or R marks) can immediately register the Amazon Brand!

● Automated protection: Amazon will use the information provided by the brand to try to identify and remove potentially bad product information before infringement occurs through machine learning to effectively protect the brand, restrict the creation of offers, create ASINs, etc. In 2020, Amazon monitors more than 5 billion attempted revisions to product detail pages every day.

● Transparency Transparency Program: If they want to prevent counterfeit sales in advance, brands can also select suitable ASINs to join the Transparency Transparency Program. Each product participating in the program requires a unique transparency code. This code is checked during listing, logistics, etc., and cannot be sold without the correct code.

● Report a Violation Tool (Report a Violation): Effective reporting. Through this tool, brands can search for and report potential infringements, and can even authorize intellectual property owners and their agents to notify Amazon of suspected intellectual property infringements, including the three types of trademark, copyright, and patent infringement.

● Project Zero: Self-service removal. If a brand has submitted a potential infringement report using the Report a Violation tool (Report a Violation) in the past 6 months, and the acceptance rate is at least 90%, the brand may also be authorized by Project Zero to self-remove counterfeit products without reporting to Amazon and waiting for results.

From the beginning, Chase Technology has firmly followed the path of brand development. Within 1 year, it has completed brand registration on 8 Amazon sites, and attached great importance to intellectual property protection. As of March 2022, Chase Technology has applied for 2,262 patents worldwide, including 775 invention patent applications and 142 PCT applications, and has obtained a total of 1,194 authorized patents. Among Amazon's brand protection tools, the Report a Violation tool is very convenient and efficient. In the past year, we also added 23 products to the Transparency transparency program, hoping to protect the brand at the source and prevent counterfeiting.

After the Amazon Brand Registry, we found a significant reduction in infringements. Over the past year, we have protected 18 products using the Transparency transparency program, and there has been a significant decrease in sell-related reviews.

Amazon's brand protection tools make infringement complaints and brand protection easier. We use the infringement reporting tool Report a Violation to complain about counterfeit sales, and we can generally get a response from Amazon within 48 hours. Last year, we also added more than a dozen products to the Transparency transparency program, effectively blocking negative reviews caused by fakes, which greatly helped increase sales.

Over the past year, we have protected more than 15W products using the Transparency transparency program, effectively preventing cases related to counterfeit sales and brand infringement on Amazon. "