24 ms·

Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again

282 points by howard941 8y ago

jihadjihad 8y ago
I first heard about counterfeit goods on Amazon from HN, and at the time thought, "Hm, must be a west-coast thing, hasn't happened to me before." In the last year I've received a handful of very obvious fakes and have (thankfully) been able to return them since the items were "fulfilled by Amazon." It's not surprising that with the volume of items pushed by Amazon there are going to be some fakes. What is surprising is how merchants fulfilled by Amazon lack any incentive AFAIK to ship real goods. For any major purchase from now on, I'm going to buy local or buy direct from the manufacturer. It's just a waste of time to hope that what you get in the mail is what you ordered in the first place.
blueadept111 8y ago
I knew this would blow up. Sadly, Amazon/createspace (now called KDP) apparenty has no mechanism or will to ban users who abuse the system. I am a KDP author myself, with three titles under my belt in the nature/regional category. About three months ago I noticed flagrant copyright infringement of a well-known author in my field. The title had a one star rating, because a number of people had left negative reviews pointing out (in no uncertain terms) that it was not genuine. I emailed and then called support (twice) and pointed it out. Even after escalating the issue as far as I could, it resulted in no action. Even a cursory review should have stopped the title from being published, since it was of ridiculously poor-quality (analogous to someone publishing a title called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Legacy by J.K. Rowling" and having an apparently legit front cover but an interior filled with almost nonsensical, semi-autogenerated text). The fact that a title like this can be published on the platform at all indicates that the review process for new titles is sadly lacking any application of common sense. I'm appreciative that Amazon is pushing the envelope in supporting self-publishers via their print on demand services, but by failing (and actually refusing) to police it they are giving a bad name to the whole enterprise. Through their inaction they are encouraging the copyright infringers and scammers to turn what could/should be a great service into a toxic ecosystem.
- m463 8y ago
  There are so many glaring problems. I don't know why you can't just highlight text in a kindle book and say: [x] typo [x] mispelling [x] grammatical error [x] garbage characters [x] plagiarized [x] missing section separator [x] other [______________] maybe the REAL issue is that all of these are post-sales problems
rubyfan 8y ago
Isn’t it more accurate that a seller is using Amazon’s publishing platform to counterfeit and sell other publishers books? The title suggests Amazon has wrongdoing here. You could make the case that they need more policing and review but it’s not like Amazon is knowingly selling counterfeit here.
- behringer 8y ago
  Amazon has a well known history of simply ignoring copyright complaints. We can assume at this point Amazon is the malicious actor here.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  Pretty sure selling counterfeit goods, or committing fraud by advertising for them, is illegal. Does hiding behind "but it's not us selling it" work better for stores than for content hosts? What about fraudulent "fulfilled by Amazon" products?
- bleriot 8y ago
  Considering that Amazon fulfills orders using counterfeit items from suppliers that they know have previously provided fakes to customers, and then removes reviews that point out counterfeits, I’d say they’re complicit in it. I’ve personally had a review removed that called out an obviously counterfeit item I received. That was two years ago and the seller is still on Amazon, and Amazon is still removing other reviewers’ bad reviews of them.
  - busyant 8y ago
    This seems like a long-term recipe for disaster for Amazon. Why do it? Or am I being naive? Or is it too difficult to clamp down on fakes?
- stefan_ 8y ago
  Amazon printed, packaged, sorted, shipped and charged the buyer for the book. And it wasn't even the first time. Who is this mysterious third party that should be responsible here? Why would "we fully automated our counterfeiting process" be an excuse?
tzs 8y ago
In the Tweet about one of the counterfeits, Bill Pollock says: > Images of counterfeit copies of Python for Kids being sold on Amazon. Legit copies are thicker, color, layflat binding, nicer paper I've noticed on occasion my local Barnes & Noble will have two copies of a book and one will be noticeably thicker than the other. Same edition, same cover art, same number of pages, but one just seems to be on thicker paper. I've only noticed this in the computer section, but I generally only visit that section, other STEM sections, science fiction, and graphic novels, and of those only the computer section is likely to have multiple copies of books that are thick enough that a difference in thickness would be noticeable while browsing, so there may be selection bias here. Does this mean counterfeits are even making their way onto bookstore shelves? Or do some publishers have a range of paper sizes they might use for a give book, and what is actually used varies from print run to print run?
- thefrostytruth 8y ago
  No, it's likely to be different legitimate print runs. Sometimes the same paper is unavailable, sometimes a book moves to a different manufacturing method based on demand (e.g., offset to short run to print-on-demand). The source of Amazon's problem is their third-party marketplace and their practice of "co mingling" third-party stock with their "regular" stock -- this is unlikely to be the case with Barnes & Noble
gesman 8y ago
+100 Amazon is trying hard to keep counterfeits and fake products/reviews under the rugs for as long as possible, so the more publicity to their ignorance - the merrier.
- jihadjihad 8y ago
  With the prevalence of counterfeits and their push to feature "Sponsored" products in SERPs, the case to ditch Amazon becomes easier every day.
pheeney 8y ago
I am currently caught up in an amazon scam. The third party seller listed items, put in fake shipping, item never arrived. It's been over a month and I am still fighting amazon to get my money back. They have an "A to Z guarantee" which doesn't work, at least not in my case. The seller didn't even need to sell counterfeit items without running off with my money. Amazon customer support has no idea what to do since the third party is supposed to refund me.
- tyingq 8y ago
  I wonder if Amazon bans you if you file a chargeback.
  - pheeney 8y ago
    That is what I am really concerned with. Some automatic process that will ban me if I try and fight their system. The only way out is to make enough noise on social media that someone in corporate makes a policy exception.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Why worry about being banned? Why would you want to continue to do business with a company that treats you like this? When I get to the point where I am contemplating a CC chargeback, the bridge is already burned.
      - neetdeth 8y ago
        Because Amazon is no longer a simple bookseller. It's a diversified mega-corporation that is big enough that the average individual will want to think twice before getting on its bad side. What if you want to host something on AWS? Stream on Twitch? Shop at an Amazon Go? Keep listening to your Audible library? What if you're using home automation equipment that's tethered to a cloud service and Amazon acquires the company? Sure, a simple chargeback probably won't trigger broad spectrum retaliation though all their subsidiaries, but the fact is that Amazon has accrued a lot of power in recent years.
cobookman 8y ago
How isnt Amazon liable for this / sued? If Walmart did the same there would be various lawsuits
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  They are probably liable, but it's also not intentional behavior which means less damages - so it's not worth being the first person to sue them. This is just Amazon being sloppy and not having any reasonable checks or controls on their print service.
  - exhilaration 8y ago
    I could also see Amazon retaliating by refusing to carry a publisher's book if they sued.
  - leoc 8y ago
    The classic "control fraud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud strategy is to incentivise your subordinates to maximise revenues while "neglecting" to check that they aren't engaging in fraud to do it. Then you can protest your innocence when the fraud comes to light.
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    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      This is partly why business is done on the golf course. Plausible deniability is quite lucrative.
      - umeshunni 8y ago
        > This is partly why business is done on the golf course. What do you mean?
ckastner 8y ago
The counterfeit and review manipulation issues have rendered Amazon unpleasant enough for me that buying local is something I've started to enjoy again. I trust the merchant to have performed some kind of vetting for merchandise sold on premise, and the price is often good or (interestingly enough) even better than on Amazon. Often enough local is still more expensive, but it beats browsing Amazon for an hour, sifting through reviews that can no longer be trusted.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut. I was irate, having paid $10 for these. So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again. I've been far more aware as of late that whenever I search for something (say the staple gun I recently got my wife) all I get are offbrand or knockoff results showing for often several pages. I have to go, figure out which brands are reputable and then come back to actually make my purchase. I'd rather just go to a brick and mortar at this point. I'm definitely not renewing my amazon prime.
  - paulgb 8y ago
    I had a similar experience with a cookbook I was gifted that turned out to be fake: the author had impressive credentials (top culinary schools, etc.) but when I went to find more information about her I couldn't - all I could find was the same "author photo" for sale on a stock photo site. The book was a cobbled-together collection of recipes, some incomplete, apparently collected haphazardly from around the web. I left a review saying this on the book, and Amazon deleted it because they thought my review was fraudulent. Of course, the book at the time had a 5-star rating from fake accounts.
  - jahewson 8y ago
    Ha ha, I had the exact same experience cutting guitar string with wire cutters from my local dollar store.
EliRivers 8y ago
Here's a previous discussion when the same publisher was being pirated by Amazon previously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546
djaychela 8y ago
Surely this should be an easy fix for them to be able to detect counterfeit books being created? If they are anything like other on demand self publishing platforms, you upload a pdf or similar file to create the book, and surely it's not beyond the wit of those at amazon to create an ml based system that would be able to detect similar files to those of legitimate books that they already carry and flag them to the legitimate publisher for manual review (if they can't be bothered to police it themselves as it appears)?
- sacheendra 8y ago
  It is not that easy. They need a reliable system to do that. For what can go wrong, see all the hate Youtube's ContentID gets. But, identifying whole books should be simple enough.
  - DennisP 8y ago
    If the official book is available on Kindle, then it actually should be quite simple for them to use a locality-sensitive hash to find plagiarized uploads.
- blunte 8y ago
  I can guarantee that Amazon has the brainpower to solve this problem. They just don't have any real incentive to.
  - consumer451 8y ago
    3rd person, nearly useless anecdote: I have heard around Seattle that this is “the biggest issue we have” in the minds of Amazon employees.
- ghaff 8y ago
  For books on Kindle, Amazon at least used to do some degree of checking. I published a book five or six years ago that was based in part on blog posts that I had previously published in a number of different places. They flagged my book and I had to send them a number of links demonstrating that I was the original author.
pfarnsworth 8y ago
Amazon gets away with this because it's practically impossible for small business owners or authors to police their site. It's similar to Google, where they let counterfeits thrive, but real content creators get fake DMCA notices and shut down. I really hate to say this, but large companies like this need to be regulated via laws. There's simply no other choice. Having Amazon throw their hands up and say "There's nothing we can do, we have algorithms" or hiding behind the safe-harbor laws is not acceptable. Having their ability to shut off peoples' incomes or being victimized by counterfeiters, with no human contact and no process, is unacceptable and needs to be changed. They aren't changing fast enough and they don't want to change because it's expensive, and the only solution is to force them via laws, which I'm loathe to support but it's the only way.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  large companies like this need to be regulated via laws They are, and you cited it: the DMCA. You can read it here: https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl105-304.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl105-304.pdf It is mixed bag. One of the effects is that it deters proactive culling of material because once you start doing that, you may become liable for items you miss. It is why we end up up with systems that are driven by external takedown requests.
- dnautics 8y ago
  Why should large companies be regulated on this specific topic but not small companies? It's equally illegal activity.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    In this case, the laws probably need to apply universally. But scale matters. Systems (even economic systems) at scale have different characteristics than those that are not. Just like you'd implement a massive AWS system differently than you would a little, single Ec2 service - regulations would probably be characterized differently given the scale and power of the entities involved. One major difference is risk mitigation: individual consumers may have some power to influence a mom and pop shop, especially one that has a physical retail presence. A negative local news highlight could make a big difference. A single legal grievance could have consequences. There's material risk. At a certain scale, it seems some of these entities simply don't have to worry about fraud, because 'who's gonna do something about it?'. The only public recourse is public institutions.
mojomark 8y ago
Totally, this. As a case in point, my "Digital Image Processing and Analysis: Human and Computer Vision Applications with CVIPtools, Second Edition" text book stated right on the cover that the book was "Not for sale in the US" (or something to that effect). Seemed odd, then I read the intro in which the author was excited that he finally convinced the publisher to print in color. My book was not in color (super great for an image processing text). Two weeks later, the binding started to come undone - not just a little - literally all of the pages fell out. Awesome, thanks Bezos!
- rb808 8y ago
  abebooks (part of amazon) sells a lot of international editions. https://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-editions-faqs.shtml https://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-editi... It makes sense to sell the same book at lower prices in parts of the world where the regular price is unaffordable. Importing those books back to the US is not what publishers want, but I think isn't illegal.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Yes. It's typically legal as decided by the US Supreme Court in 2013 Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. (6-3 decision with a rather atypical split.) Added: Basically the decision affirmed that first sale doctrine applied.
    - mojomark 8y ago
      Wow, that is useful information! Ne'er again will I buy a text without reading the fine print. Lesson learned.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        And I've bought an Indian version of a textbook for about 20% of the price of the "regular" edition that was perfectly adequate for my needs. So, if you're implying that Amazon shouldn't sell these, I don't agree. They're legal and they're good enough for a lot of people. (As I recall, in my case, it was obviously not the US version.)
mindcrime 8y ago
https://qz.com/1542839/amazon-has-finally-admitted-to-investors-that-it-has-a-counterfeit-problem/ https://qz.com/1542839/amazon-has-finally-admitted-to-invest... Well, admitting you have a problem is the first step, so maybe now they'll finally get serious about fixing this shit.
- ProAm 8y ago
  Its hard to admit you have a problem when your problem still brings in buckets of money everyday. I dont think they care, how much can a publisher or author sue amazon for peddling counterfeit wares? That is when it will matter, when they start losing large settlements.
  - the-pigeon 8y ago
    Why hasn't the US Consumer Protection Bureau stepped in at this point? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing they are suppose to prevent?
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Why hasn't the US Consumer Protection Bureau stepped in at this point? Because no such bureau exists? You may be thinking of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which deals with financial products) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (which deals with physical safety issues), but (while physical safety issues are among the problems produced) neither one is really focussed on these issues. The kind of fraud at issue is probably more in the bailiwick of the Federal Trade Commission and the International Trade Commission (when the original source is foreign), but probably most people affected by counterfeits are just returning products or eating the cost and not complaining to the FTC or the falsely-purported manufacturer (who, IIRC, would be the party in position to complain to the ITC).
mark_l_watson 8y ago
Yup, this happened to me: I saw a very low price on a Chez Scheme book and bought it. I am fairly certain the book was an unauthorized copy. I felt like the author and publisher were cheated, but to be honest I did the simplest thing and just kept the book and I am gentle with it when opening it for reading so it does not fall apart.
1024core 8y ago
Back in the day, when song piracy was hot in the news, you'd hear of people claiming that each song pirated had cost the copyright own over $150K. Why can't Amazon be sued for $150K per book?
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  That only really worked because the defendants couldn't afford good counsel. That sort of fraudulent legal claim won't work against Amazon. Besides which I think the courts did eventually move on to realistically valuing contributory infringement (15¢ perhaps instead of $150k).
blunte 8y ago
Amazon has little incentive to stop selling counterfeit goods. It is simply not reasonable to believe that they are not capable of accurately preventing counterfeit goods from surviving in their site. Remember, this is the same company run by the brilliant micromanaging CEO. Everything that happens within Amazon is known to him. If an individual setup their own website and sold counterfeit goods, the feds would come down on them hard. So you have to wonder what keeps Amazon immune from being shut down for willfully breaking laws...
- widowlark 8y ago
  It's only their job to attempt to prevent listing and supporting counterfeit products. Every individual is responsible for themselves to not break the law and sell a fake product.
buttholesurfer 8y ago
Another trend I've seen is stores selling international editions. It's not a big issue to me, minus the usually crappier paper and cover. But it does seem shady.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
It's one thing for counterfeits to be found among all of the 3rd party resellers ... but this is just beyond pale. I think NYC was wrong to kill 25K jobs on the general merits - but - if Bezos wanted the counterfeiting problem solved, it would be solved. Ergo - Bezos is a counterfeiter. Think of all of the other 'competitive advantages' that Amazon has - now they use their 3rd party an in-house counterfeiters to screw other value chain members as well.
widowlark 8y ago
Is a book by another spine still a book?
petilon 8y ago
I ordered a copy of Deep Learning [1] from Amazon last week. On Barnes & Noble [2] the book costs $76.80. On Amazon it is just $28.00. I received the book a couple of days ago. The pages look like it was printed using a low-resolution printer, and the ink color is uneven across pages. I am returning the book. Possible counterfeit, sold by a third party seller. On the other hand this book is also available free online [3]. Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Adaptive-Computation-Machine/dp/0262035618/ref=sr_1_3 https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Adaptive-Computation-Ma... [2] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deep-learning-ian-goodfellow/1126352242?ean=9780262035613 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deep-learning-ian-goodfello... [3] https://www.deeplearningbook.org/ https://www.deeplearningbook.org/
- dspillett 8y ago
  > Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it? The first entry in the FAQ doesn't directly address that issue but strongly suggests an answer, morally if not legally: Q: Can I get a PDF of this book? A: No, our contract with MIT Press forbids distribution of too easily copied electronic formats of the book. I don't seen any obvious link to a licence that might confirm or contradict this impression, so if you need/want to know for sure you'll have to contact them to ask for clarification if you can't find it elsewhere.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    It's likely not really about licensing. They have a contract with the publisher that presumably allows them to do certain things and doesn't allow them to do others. (I know that's been the case when I've signed a book contract.) Presumably, in this case, they're allowed to publish the full contents in web form on their site but not to publish them in a form that would allow someone to easily print the entire contents in book form.
- jbay808 8y ago
  I ordered a textbook on control theory from Amazon. It arrived, but the material inside the covers is from a small animal veterinary textbook. Byaa different publisher. I took a closer look at the cover, it was poorly printed and didn't quite fit. I'm still confused about how the vendor expected to get away with it. Did they just guess that half of people won't bother opening the textbook? And why not fill it with blank pages then?
DomreiRoam 8y ago
Is the problem affecting all amazon or mainly amazon.com? I m shopping mostly on amazon.de or .fr and I didn't encounter the problem yet.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
These aren't counterfeit books. They're unlicensed books. You're getting exactly what you order.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  Important distinction that some manufacturers intentionally try to cloud in legislation. Counterfeit drugs, for example, are drugs that do not contain the correct chemicals in the correct proportion. It is not drugs that were sold in violation of a patent, or in a country where they aren't licensed.
- tzs 8y ago
  They are pretty much the definition of counterfeit. The Oxford dictionary defines counterfeit as "Made in exact imitation of something valuable with the intention to deceive or defraud".
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    There's an implication that you're defrauding the person buying the counterfeit item. That's not true here; the person being "defrauded" is the copyright owner.
    - tzs 8y ago
      The buyer purchased a book that claims to be, and is marketed as, a No Starch Press book. No Starch Press books are known for their physical quality and their lay-flat binding. These books were lower quality and did not have a lay-flat binding. How is that not defrauding the buyer?
      - kfwhp 8y ago
        You are right for the cases where the buyer cares about the quality of the book. But most of the time we only care about the words inside the book.
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
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ericnyamu 8y ago
If you buy best sellers you cannot buy fakes. The first page full of bestsellers gives you enough choices. They sell well for a reason.So do amazon search like bestselling <item>
acd 8y ago
In Sweden BBS-lagen is applicable here. That is you run a community service where the users publish works. 5 § "Skyldighet att ta bort vissa meddelanden" The obligation to remove certain messages 2. It is obvious that the user has infringed copyright or rights protected by regulation in Chapter 5. the law (1960: 729) on copyright for literary and artistic works by submitting the message. Here is the US law https://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/scitech/volume1/orourke.pdf https://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/scitech/volume1/orou... "contributory infringement" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infringement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infring... Material contribution "second situation is when the means for facilitating the infringement such as machinery is provided by the defendant" Providing printing press ability and the electronic means to upload/download without scanning via OCR for copyright infringement of known text and print service and the platform itself
mnm1 8y ago
90% of the stuff on Amazon is fake or counterfeit. Why would anyone expect the book division to be different? This is what Amazon has decided to be: a marketplace for garbage products, most fake or extremely low quality. Their strategy is based on the fact that consumers don't know better and if they do and start returning products, shutting those accounts off. Some copyright infringement is perfect for diversifying their business model of selling garbage.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
Whenever I am buying something I care about I avoid Amazon. I am cancelling prime because of it.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
Amazon is my site of last resort (read: less that $100 per year). I'll check it for the reviews (but am always mindful they could be bogus), and to get a general sense for price. I purposely us BN.com or just about anywhere else for books. I can't allow myself to be a regular Amazon customer. Its ethics and practices leave me feeling dirtier than I want to feel.
lotaezenwa 8y ago
I once ordered a copy of Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) on Amazon. I had been a TA for Thomas Cormen at the time, and wanted the author's signature. He took one look at it, compared it to the copies he had in his office and said, "This is a counterfeit copy. Where did you get this?" The embarrassment haunts me to this day.
jdkee 8y ago
I stopped buying books from Amazon and returned to buying from a local independent bookstore.

282 points by howard941 8y ago

I first heard about counterfeit goods on Amazon from HN, and at the time thought, "Hm, must be a west-coast thing, hasn't happened to me before." In the last year I've received a handful of very obvious fakes and have (thankfully) been able to return them since the items were "fulfilled by Amazon." It's not surprising that with the volume of items pushed by Amazon there are going to be some fakes. What is surprising is how merchants fulfilled by Amazon lack any incentive AFAIK to ship real goods. For any major purchase from now on, I'm going to buy local or buy direct from the manufacturer. It's just a waste of time to hope that what you get in the mail is what you ordered in the first place.

blueadept111 8y ago

I knew this would blow up. Sadly, Amazon/createspace (now called KDP) apparenty has no mechanism or will to ban users who abuse the system. I am a KDP author myself, with three titles under my belt in the nature/regional category. About three months ago I noticed flagrant copyright infringement of a well-known author in my field. The title had a one star rating, because a number of people had left negative reviews pointing out (in no uncertain terms) that it was not genuine. I emailed and then called support (twice) and pointed it out. Even after escalating the issue as far as I could, it resulted in no action. Even a cursory review should have stopped the title from being published, since it was of ridiculously poor-quality (analogous to someone publishing a title called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Legacy by J.K. Rowling" and having an apparently legit front cover but an interior filled with almost nonsensical, semi-autogenerated text). The fact that a title like this can be published on the platform at all indicates that the review process for new titles is sadly lacking any application of common sense. I'm appreciative that Amazon is pushing the envelope in supporting self-publishers via their print on demand services, but by failing (and actually refusing) to police it they are giving a bad name to the whole enterprise. Through their inaction they are encouraging the copyright infringers and scammers to turn what could/should be a great service into a toxic ecosystem.

m463 8y ago
There are so many glaring problems. I don't know why you can't just highlight text in a kindle book and say: [x] typo [x] mispelling [x] grammatical error [x] garbage characters [x] plagiarized [x] missing section separator [x] other [______________] maybe the REAL issue is that all of these are post-sales problems

rubyfan 8y ago

Isn’t it more accurate that a seller is using Amazon’s publishing platform to counterfeit and sell other publishers books? The title suggests Amazon has wrongdoing here. You could make the case that they need more policing and review but it’s not like Amazon is knowingly selling counterfeit here.

behringer 8y ago
Amazon has a well known history of simply ignoring copyright complaints. We can assume at this point Amazon is the malicious actor here.
ashelmire 8y ago
Pretty sure selling counterfeit goods, or committing fraud by advertising for them, is illegal. Does hiding behind "but it's not us selling it" work better for stores than for content hosts? What about fraudulent "fulfilled by Amazon" products?
bleriot 8y ago
Considering that Amazon fulfills orders using counterfeit items from suppliers that they know have previously provided fakes to customers, and then removes reviews that point out counterfeits, I’d say they’re complicit in it. I’ve personally had a review removed that called out an obviously counterfeit item I received. That was two years ago and the seller is still on Amazon, and Amazon is still removing other reviewers’ bad reviews of them.
- busyant 8y ago
  This seems like a long-term recipe for disaster for Amazon. Why do it? Or am I being naive? Or is it too difficult to clamp down on fakes?
stefan_ 8y ago
Amazon printed, packaged, sorted, shipped and charged the buyer for the book. And it wasn't even the first time. Who is this mysterious third party that should be responsible here? Why would "we fully automated our counterfeiting process" be an excuse?

tzs 8y ago

In the Tweet about one of the counterfeits, Bill Pollock says: > Images of counterfeit copies of Python for Kids being sold on Amazon. Legit copies are thicker, color, layflat binding, nicer paper I've noticed on occasion my local Barnes & Noble will have two copies of a book and one will be noticeably thicker than the other. Same edition, same cover art, same number of pages, but one just seems to be on thicker paper. I've only noticed this in the computer section, but I generally only visit that section, other STEM sections, science fiction, and graphic novels, and of those only the computer section is likely to have multiple copies of books that are thick enough that a difference in thickness would be noticeable while browsing, so there may be selection bias here. Does this mean counterfeits are even making their way onto bookstore shelves? Or do some publishers have a range of paper sizes they might use for a give book, and what is actually used varies from print run to print run?

thefrostytruth 8y ago
No, it's likely to be different legitimate print runs. Sometimes the same paper is unavailable, sometimes a book moves to a different manufacturing method based on demand (e.g., offset to short run to print-on-demand). The source of Amazon's problem is their third-party marketplace and their practice of "co mingling" third-party stock with their "regular" stock -- this is unlikely to be the case with Barnes & Noble

gesman 8y ago

+100 Amazon is trying hard to keep counterfeits and fake products/reviews under the rugs for as long as possible, so the more publicity to their ignorance - the merrier.

jihadjihad 8y ago
With the prevalence of counterfeits and their push to feature "Sponsored" products in SERPs, the case to ditch Amazon becomes easier every day.

pheeney 8y ago

I am currently caught up in an amazon scam. The third party seller listed items, put in fake shipping, item never arrived. It's been over a month and I am still fighting amazon to get my money back. They have an "A to Z guarantee" which doesn't work, at least not in my case. The seller didn't even need to sell counterfeit items without running off with my money. Amazon customer support has no idea what to do since the third party is supposed to refund me.

tyingq 8y ago
I wonder if Amazon bans you if you file a chargeback.
- pheeney 8y ago
  That is what I am really concerned with. Some automatic process that will ban me if I try and fight their system. The only way out is to make enough noise on social media that someone in corporate makes a policy exception.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    Why worry about being banned? Why would you want to continue to do business with a company that treats you like this? When I get to the point where I am contemplating a CC chargeback, the bridge is already burned.
    - neetdeth 8y ago
      Because Amazon is no longer a simple bookseller. It's a diversified mega-corporation that is big enough that the average individual will want to think twice before getting on its bad side. What if you want to host something on AWS? Stream on Twitch? Shop at an Amazon Go? Keep listening to your Audible library? What if you're using home automation equipment that's tethered to a cloud service and Amazon acquires the company? Sure, a simple chargeback probably won't trigger broad spectrum retaliation though all their subsidiaries, but the fact is that Amazon has accrued a lot of power in recent years.

cobookman 8y ago

How isnt Amazon liable for this / sued? If Walmart did the same there would be various lawsuits

vorpalhex 8y ago
They are probably liable, but it's also not intentional behavior which means less damages - so it's not worth being the first person to sue them. This is just Amazon being sloppy and not having any reasonable checks or controls on their print service.
- exhilaration 8y ago
  I could also see Amazon retaliating by refusing to carry a publisher's book if they sued.
- leoc 8y ago
  The classic "control fraud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud strategy is to incentivise your subordinates to maximise revenues while "neglecting" to check that they aren't engaging in fraud to do it. Then you can protest your innocence when the fraud comes to light.
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  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    This is partly why business is done on the golf course. Plausible deniability is quite lucrative.
    - umeshunni 8y ago
      > This is partly why business is done on the golf course. What do you mean?

ckastner 8y ago

The counterfeit and review manipulation issues have rendered Amazon unpleasant enough for me that buying local is something I've started to enjoy again. I trust the merchant to have performed some kind of vetting for merchandise sold on premise, and the price is often good or (interestingly enough) even better than on Amazon. Often enough local is still more expensive, but it beats browsing Amazon for an hour, sifting through reviews that can no longer be trusted.

crowbahr 8y ago
I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut. I was irate, having paid $10 for these. So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again. I've been far more aware as of late that whenever I search for something (say the staple gun I recently got my wife) all I get are offbrand or knockoff results showing for often several pages. I have to go, figure out which brands are reputable and then come back to actually make my purchase. I'd rather just go to a brick and mortar at this point. I'm definitely not renewing my amazon prime.
- paulgb 8y ago
  I had a similar experience with a cookbook I was gifted that turned out to be fake: the author had impressive credentials (top culinary schools, etc.) but when I went to find more information about her I couldn't - all I could find was the same "author photo" for sale on a stock photo site. The book was a cobbled-together collection of recipes, some incomplete, apparently collected haphazardly from around the web. I left a review saying this on the book, and Amazon deleted it because they thought my review was fraudulent. Of course, the book at the time had a 5-star rating from fake accounts.
- jahewson 8y ago
  Ha ha, I had the exact same experience cutting guitar string with wire cutters from my local dollar store.

EliRivers 8y ago

Here's a previous discussion when the same publisher was being pirated by Amazon previously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

djaychela 8y ago

Surely this should be an easy fix for them to be able to detect counterfeit books being created? If they are anything like other on demand self publishing platforms, you upload a pdf or similar file to create the book, and surely it's not beyond the wit of those at amazon to create an ml based system that would be able to detect similar files to those of legitimate books that they already carry and flag them to the legitimate publisher for manual review (if they can't be bothered to police it themselves as it appears)?

sacheendra 8y ago
It is not that easy. They need a reliable system to do that. For what can go wrong, see all the hate Youtube's ContentID gets. But, identifying whole books should be simple enough.
- DennisP 8y ago
  If the official book is available on Kindle, then it actually should be quite simple for them to use a locality-sensitive hash to find plagiarized uploads.
blunte 8y ago
I can guarantee that Amazon has the brainpower to solve this problem. They just don't have any real incentive to.
- consumer451 8y ago
  3rd person, nearly useless anecdote: I have heard around Seattle that this is “the biggest issue we have” in the minds of Amazon employees.
ghaff 8y ago
For books on Kindle, Amazon at least used to do some degree of checking. I published a book five or six years ago that was based in part on blog posts that I had previously published in a number of different places. They flagged my book and I had to send them a number of links demonstrating that I was the original author.

pfarnsworth 8y ago

Amazon gets away with this because it's practically impossible for small business owners or authors to police their site. It's similar to Google, where they let counterfeits thrive, but real content creators get fake DMCA notices and shut down. I really hate to say this, but large companies like this need to be regulated via laws. There's simply no other choice. Having Amazon throw their hands up and say "There's nothing we can do, we have algorithms" or hiding behind the safe-harbor laws is not acceptable. Having their ability to shut off peoples' incomes or being victimized by counterfeiters, with no human contact and no process, is unacceptable and needs to be changed. They aren't changing fast enough and they don't want to change because it's expensive, and the only solution is to force them via laws, which I'm loathe to support but it's the only way.

WillPostForFood 8y ago
large companies like this need to be regulated via laws They are, and you cited it: the DMCA. You can read it here: https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl105-304.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl105-304.pdf It is mixed bag. One of the effects is that it deters proactive culling of material because once you start doing that, you may become liable for items you miss. It is why we end up up with systems that are driven by external takedown requests.
dnautics 8y ago
Why should large companies be regulated on this specific topic but not small companies? It's equally illegal activity.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  In this case, the laws probably need to apply universally. But scale matters. Systems (even economic systems) at scale have different characteristics than those that are not. Just like you'd implement a massive AWS system differently than you would a little, single Ec2 service - regulations would probably be characterized differently given the scale and power of the entities involved. One major difference is risk mitigation: individual consumers may have some power to influence a mom and pop shop, especially one that has a physical retail presence. A negative local news highlight could make a big difference. A single legal grievance could have consequences. There's material risk. At a certain scale, it seems some of these entities simply don't have to worry about fraud, because 'who's gonna do something about it?'. The only public recourse is public institutions.

mojomark 8y ago

Totally, this. As a case in point, my "Digital Image Processing and Analysis: Human and Computer Vision Applications with CVIPtools, Second Edition" text book stated right on the cover that the book was "Not for sale in the US" (or something to that effect). Seemed odd, then I read the intro in which the author was excited that he finally convinced the publisher to print in color. My book was not in color (super great for an image processing text). Two weeks later, the binding started to come undone - not just a little - literally all of the pages fell out. Awesome, thanks Bezos!

rb808 8y ago
abebooks (part of amazon) sells a lot of international editions. https://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-editions-faqs.shtml https://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-editi... It makes sense to sell the same book at lower prices in parts of the world where the regular price is unaffordable. Importing those books back to the US is not what publishers want, but I think isn't illegal.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Yes. It's typically legal as decided by the US Supreme Court in 2013 Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. (6-3 decision with a rather atypical split.) Added: Basically the decision affirmed that first sale doctrine applied.
  - mojomark 8y ago
    Wow, that is useful information! Ne'er again will I buy a text without reading the fine print. Lesson learned.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      And I've bought an Indian version of a textbook for about 20% of the price of the "regular" edition that was perfectly adequate for my needs. So, if you're implying that Amazon shouldn't sell these, I don't agree. They're legal and they're good enough for a lot of people. (As I recall, in my case, it was obviously not the US version.)

mindcrime 8y ago

https://qz.com/1542839/amazon-has-finally-admitted-to-investors-that-it-has-a-counterfeit-problem/ https://qz.com/1542839/amazon-has-finally-admitted-to-invest... Well, admitting you have a problem is the first step, so maybe now they'll finally get serious about fixing this shit.

ProAm 8y ago
Its hard to admit you have a problem when your problem still brings in buckets of money everyday. I dont think they care, how much can a publisher or author sue amazon for peddling counterfeit wares? That is when it will matter, when they start losing large settlements.
- the-pigeon 8y ago
  Why hasn't the US Consumer Protection Bureau stepped in at this point? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing they are suppose to prevent?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Why hasn't the US Consumer Protection Bureau stepped in at this point? Because no such bureau exists? You may be thinking of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which deals with financial products) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (which deals with physical safety issues), but (while physical safety issues are among the problems produced) neither one is really focussed on these issues. The kind of fraud at issue is probably more in the bailiwick of the Federal Trade Commission and the International Trade Commission (when the original source is foreign), but probably most people affected by counterfeits are just returning products or eating the cost and not complaining to the FTC or the falsely-purported manufacturer (who, IIRC, would be the party in position to complain to the ITC).

mark_l_watson 8y ago

Yup, this happened to me: I saw a very low price on a Chez Scheme book and bought it. I am fairly certain the book was an unauthorized copy. I felt like the author and publisher were cheated, but to be honest I did the simplest thing and just kept the book and I am gentle with it when opening it for reading so it does not fall apart.

1024core 8y ago

Back in the day, when song piracy was hot in the news, you'd hear of people claiming that each song pirated had cost the copyright own over $150K. Why can't Amazon be sued for $150K per book?

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
That only really worked because the defendants couldn't afford good counsel. That sort of fraudulent legal claim won't work against Amazon. Besides which I think the courts did eventually move on to realistically valuing contributory infringement (15¢ perhaps instead of $150k).

blunte 8y ago

Amazon has little incentive to stop selling counterfeit goods. It is simply not reasonable to believe that they are not capable of accurately preventing counterfeit goods from surviving in their site. Remember, this is the same company run by the brilliant micromanaging CEO. Everything that happens within Amazon is known to him. If an individual setup their own website and sold counterfeit goods, the feds would come down on them hard. So you have to wonder what keeps Amazon immune from being shut down for willfully breaking laws...

widowlark 8y ago
It's only their job to attempt to prevent listing and supporting counterfeit products. Every individual is responsible for themselves to not break the law and sell a fake product.

buttholesurfer 8y ago

Another trend I've seen is stores selling international editions. It's not a big issue to me, minus the usually crappier paper and cover. But it does seem shady.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

It's one thing for counterfeits to be found among all of the 3rd party resellers ... but this is just beyond pale. I think NYC was wrong to kill 25K jobs on the general merits - but - if Bezos wanted the counterfeiting problem solved, it would be solved. Ergo - Bezos is a counterfeiter. Think of all of the other 'competitive advantages' that Amazon has - now they use their 3rd party an in-house counterfeiters to screw other value chain members as well.

widowlark 8y ago

Is a book by another spine still a book?

petilon 8y ago

I ordered a copy of Deep Learning [1] from Amazon last week. On Barnes & Noble [2] the book costs $76.80. On Amazon it is just $28.00. I received the book a couple of days ago. The pages look like it was printed using a low-resolution printer, and the ink color is uneven across pages. I am returning the book. Possible counterfeit, sold by a third party seller. On the other hand this book is also available free online [3]. Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Adaptive-Computation-Machine/dp/0262035618/ref=sr_1_3 https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Adaptive-Computation-Ma... [2] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deep-learning-ian-goodfellow/1126352242?ean=9780262035613 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deep-learning-ian-goodfello... [3] https://www.deeplearningbook.org/ https://www.deeplearningbook.org/

dspillett 8y ago
> Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it? The first entry in the FAQ doesn't directly address that issue but strongly suggests an answer, morally if not legally: Q: Can I get a PDF of this book? A: No, our contract with MIT Press forbids distribution of too easily copied electronic formats of the book. I don't seen any obvious link to a licence that might confirm or contradict this impression, so if you need/want to know for sure you'll have to contact them to ask for clarification if you can't find it elsewhere.
- ghaff 8y ago
  It's likely not really about licensing. They have a contract with the publisher that presumably allows them to do certain things and doesn't allow them to do others. (I know that's been the case when I've signed a book contract.) Presumably, in this case, they're allowed to publish the full contents in web form on their site but not to publish them in a form that would allow someone to easily print the entire contents in book form.
jbay808 8y ago
I ordered a textbook on control theory from Amazon. It arrived, but the material inside the covers is from a small animal veterinary textbook. Byaa different publisher. I took a closer look at the cover, it was poorly printed and didn't quite fit. I'm still confused about how the vendor expected to get away with it. Did they just guess that half of people won't bother opening the textbook? And why not fill it with blank pages then?

DomreiRoam 8y ago

Is the problem affecting all amazon or mainly amazon.com? I m shopping mostly on amazon.de or .fr and I didn't encounter the problem yet.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

These aren't counterfeit books. They're unlicensed books. You're getting exactly what you order.

pessimizer 8y ago
Important distinction that some manufacturers intentionally try to cloud in legislation. Counterfeit drugs, for example, are drugs that do not contain the correct chemicals in the correct proportion. It is not drugs that were sold in violation of a patent, or in a country where they aren't licensed.
tzs 8y ago
They are pretty much the definition of counterfeit. The Oxford dictionary defines counterfeit as "Made in exact imitation of something valuable with the intention to deceive or defraud".
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  There's an implication that you're defrauding the person buying the counterfeit item. That's not true here; the person being "defrauded" is the copyright owner.
  - tzs 8y ago
    The buyer purchased a book that claims to be, and is marketed as, a No Starch Press book. No Starch Press books are known for their physical quality and their lay-flat binding. These books were lower quality and did not have a lay-flat binding. How is that not defrauding the buyer?
    - kfwhp 8y ago
      You are right for the cases where the buyer cares about the quality of the book. But most of the time we only care about the words inside the book.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago

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ericnyamu 8y ago

If you buy best sellers you cannot buy fakes. The first page full of bestsellers gives you enough choices. They sell well for a reason.So do amazon search like bestselling <item>

acd 8y ago

In Sweden BBS-lagen is applicable here. That is you run a community service where the users publish works. 5 § "Skyldighet att ta bort vissa meddelanden" The obligation to remove certain messages 2. It is obvious that the user has infringed copyright or rights protected by regulation in Chapter 5. the law (1960: 729) on copyright for literary and artistic works by submitting the message. Here is the US law https://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/scitech/volume1/orourke.pdf https://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/scitech/volume1/orou... "contributory infringement" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infringement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infring... Material contribution "second situation is when the means for facilitating the infringement such as machinery is provided by the defendant" Providing printing press ability and the electronic means to upload/download without scanning via OCR for copyright infringement of known text and print service and the platform itself

mnm1 8y ago

90% of the stuff on Amazon is fake or counterfeit. Why would anyone expect the book division to be different? This is what Amazon has decided to be: a marketplace for garbage products, most fake or extremely low quality. Their strategy is based on the fact that consumers don't know better and if they do and start returning products, shutting those accounts off. Some copyright infringement is perfect for diversifying their business model of selling garbage.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

Whenever I am buying something I care about I avoid Amazon. I am cancelling prime because of it.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

Amazon is my site of last resort (read: less that $100 per year). I'll check it for the reviews (but am always mindful they could be bogus), and to get a general sense for price. I purposely us BN.com or just about anywhere else for books. I can't allow myself to be a regular Amazon customer. Its ethics and practices leave me feeling dirtier than I want to feel.

lotaezenwa 8y ago

I once ordered a copy of Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) on Amazon. I had been a TA for Thomas Cormen at the time, and wanted the author's signature. He took one look at it, compared it to the copies he had in his office and said, "This is a counterfeit copy. Where did you get this?" The embarrassment haunts me to this day.

jdkee 8y ago

I stopped buying books from Amazon and returned to buying from a local independent bookstore.