I have a competitor who has copied my product images and using them on his listings.
How does Ebay handle copyright / IP infringement cases - will they just remove the listings, or suspend the seller?
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Generally speaking, I’m constrained to conclude that eBay’s VeRO (‘eBayese’ for "Verified Rights Owner) Program [link], has served many of us better than not in asserting Rights Ownership…
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There are a bunch of eBay sellers who buy “pallets” of random Amazon returns that you thought were being destroyed, but were actually “disposed” (meaning sold for pennies on the dollar) via some third-party liquidations company.
The eBay seller knows all the stuff that they bought is from Amazon, so they scan barcodes, and apparently have software (or cheap offshore labor) to copy listings as a whole from Amazon to eBay.
VERO works very well here, you fill in the form, you attach a URL to the eBay listing and the URL to your Amazon listing, and poof goes the eBay listing. But it is a game of wack-a-mole that will never end as long as your customer-damaged returns are “disposed of” rather than returned to you.
Nb: The above assumes that you have a registered copyright on the photos and text of your listing, as copyright is the easy take-down method here.
We learned this the hard way, and the members of this forum educated us about Amazon’s disturbing definition of “dispose”. They literally destroy a brand name’s reputation with crap like this, what are they thinking?
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In my scenario, the competitor took our product image, and is using it on his listing. Our product photo has a sticker on it (which we also sell separately) that contains our registered trademark name, which he obscured with his own style, competing sticker, obscuring our trademark.
Its a shame, in this scenario, that Ebay isn’t as strict as Amazon, where is Ebay account would otherwise be in jeopardy.
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Good question. They used to shoot first and ask questions later (like Amazon does now). However, I BELIEVE they give sellers like 2 days to remove the offending intellectual property before actually removing the listing.
This actually can be seen as good…as way too many people used VERO many years ago to get rid of competitors unfairly, etc. (if you were a seller).
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