Amazon refuses to take down illegal copy of my game!

I see ridiculous things for sale on Amazon like blue rose seeds, rainbow rose seeds and many others. Really though, stealing a game and republishing is stupid on that level or worse as the thief couldn't possibly be that technically proficient and not know that they stand 0 chance of getting rich stealing a game that wasn't making anyone rich to begin with. Someone is trolling you. Or someone freelanced and stole your work to claim as their own for resale to their customer. So the publisher does have a reasonable chance of being completely innocent.

LMAO, if you review one of these 'health' or 'organic' products with dubious health or other benefits claims on Amazon honestly, well the phonies come out of the wood work trying to defend those health and other benefit claims which they can't of course.

Complained to Amazon management about policing those fake product store listings or a least taking down listings of obvious phony products like blue rose seeds that had complaints filed against them but they didn't respond. And they've since made it more difficult to complain about such products on their website. I looked at filing with the USDA or various state agriculture departments but talk about organizations avoidant of doing their chartered duties; so next time I run across those listing I'll file with the BBB or appropriate independent organization for the locale and be done with it. As a single individual you can't be expected to babysit the world.

I've a Greenworks battery tiller operated tiller and they reshipped it to me as a return from someone else and two pieces are missing from it so I am waiting on Greenworks to ship me those parts. Thank you Amazon. I can't wait to replace my lawn with sheep fescue. One needs to use caution shopping at Amazon as it's devolved into something a bit more eBay-ish in the last couple of years. EBay and PayPal had to de-couple to help eliminate abuses in their stores. That's what Amazon faces too. I used to be able to ship gold coins insured put eBay scammers but a stop to that because they USPS wouldn't insure. Last eBay gold coin I sold I shipped to Norway USPS uninsured, one of likely much less than 70K still in existence. Thankfully, I don't need to sell gold coins because cheats have made selling anything on eBay that is expensive and collectable very difficult.

As far as game and book publishing, Amazon has been very reasonable but I don't make a lot of demands from them.

Finally, Amazon can't punish these holders of these fake listings other than to revoke those fake holders of access to Amazon's seller marketplace which they won't do most times without well documented evidence because of a lot of groundless, vengeful false complaints they get. If it's not worthwhile use of the consumer's time to file egal charges then how do you then expect it would be for Amazon? It's up to the consumer, the government, Amazon, or other interested parties to bring effective legal action while they all shirk their duties then that means you as a person of limited legal resources must, if you have a complaint, go to the BBB, the proper government agency, or some independent impartial entity whose mission is to stop such abuses; don't expect Amazon to grovel at your feet. And those agencies are besieged with false vengeful complaints as well so don't go to them without a well documented case. If you can aspire to getting rich quick you'd sure better be able to do something other than spending all your time complaining about injustices and instead document and prove your case with nakedly transparent empirical evidence. None of us is going to be getting emails from Bill Gates granting us millions. Hello.

 

It has finally been taken down completely.

I had a bookmarked link to their seller page. They have been removed.

 

Yes, they are very busy. Much more so than last year.

 

Hey guys, After I filed the DMCA Amazon finally have taken the game down. Shame it came to that and after reading @Ony 's experiences I won't be dealing with them again aside from further DMCA's if necessary.

 

The only thing I'd like to add is... that is what DMCA requests are for. Even if you sent evidence, Amazon has no way to know you didn't fake it really. They can't just take your word for it and take down the other game because if it wasn't a legitimate request, they could be sued by the other developer. By using a DMCA request, you give them the authority to act on it and indemnify them from damages if you happened to make a fake request by accepting that responsibility yourself.

 

Exactly. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if Amazon's policy was to ignore everything aside from legal documents.

 

Wouldn't surprise me. Given their scale, it probably is probably the safest way to go.

 

Can you imagine the trouble that would come from not doing this? Imagine putting a game up, someone steals the game, contacts the store and tells them they are the legitimate owner, the store takes the game down, and the pirate puts it up.

 

I wonder what would be the way out of this kind of situation? Sue the pirate?

 

It seems to me that its only a matter of time before people start trying this with DMCA notices anyway. Or is there something I'm missing?

 

That's the whole purpose of the DMCA mechanism. It gives you remedies for damages. If someone files a fraudulent DMCA notice then you can sue them. And as long as you can prove that your software was legitimate, which is pretty easy, you will win.

 

People do this on youtube all the time. They apparently don't understand the legal repercussions, and it almost always results in them groveling for forgiveness from the person they wrongfully made a claim against.

Here is an example of such dangerous idiocy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4244972AB1AAE8C9

 

On unrelated note, never thought that selling fake rose seeds is a thing and people fall for it.

 

I'm still not convinced that they (not just Amazon, all of them) are indeed "not acting on it". Is this a matter of confirmation bias? We only see the ones that become a pain to the authors and don't disappear quickly. But how many are there every day that do get nerfed, and what is the average time-to-nerf after a report is made?

After my dealings with Amazon, my main critique is that their communications leave a bit to be desired. If they improved on that would the impression here have been different?

 

Some people have a lot of trouble with set theory and seeing obvious associations to create sets. Are you one? What I stated is totally related and roses are still are more popular than games by a wide margin. The fake sellers selling them on Amazon don't differ a lot from fake sellers of stolen games on Amazon either.

No business is going to be in a rush to investigate all these complaints coming in when the overwhelming majority of them are bogus. Amazon didn't victimize the OP, they removed the game in a reasonable amount of time. The people that victimized the OP are thief that posted the game, all those filing bogus complaints with Amazon and so Amazon was working on a long prior support queue, and the OP's lack of patience for Amazon to work that queue.

 

That's exactly why I like Google's transparency report and chillingeffects where I can find details of recent DMCAs sent to Google and whether they were acted upon or not. Surely, if Google can get away with it, Amazon can too. Now, if they're willing to, this is another story.

 

Yes and no. Yes, Amazon have done really well after the DMCA takedown request was issued. Prior to that, however, the OP contacted Amazon separately and the response both missed the point and failed to point the OP towards the correct course of action. That's where the lack of patience came from, not the actions taken after the appropriate request was made.

 

I think the impact of piracy is wider than most people imagine - Amazon et al wouldn't have time to investigate all their DCMA takedown requests without some kind of automation.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/1...ake-down-2-million-piracy-links-every-day.htm

 

Well they should consider themselves lucky. Amazon never responded to my complaints about fake rose seeds being sold which is a potentially much more dangerous thing as seeds are biological and capable of spreading diseases and so there should be plenty of motive in stopping criminals from abusing Amazon's services to disburse such biologic agents.

I believe that. I'm always flabbergasted when I do a google search at all the web sites that are blatantly copying another website's pages, eg. common for a lot of health and wellness faddish type information, or blatantly SEO-ing non-relevant fictional content to get near the the top of the search results, e.g. that idiotic Urban Dictionary. I can't even tell the search engine to leave such lies out of the search results hence I avoid using google as much as possible (which is a good ideal even if it was giving relevant results).