WHITE PAPERS
eEnforce White Papers
eEnforce™ offers white papers on various subject regarding brand protection of intellectual property and enforcement. Feel Free To Download Our Papers and/or click the link below to schedule your free consultation for a high-level overview and snapshot of potential threats to your brand.
The Amazon Impact
With the explosion of E-Commerce over the past decade, many manufacturers are plagued with unauthorized sellers peddling their products in online marketplaces. The principle legal remedy available to these manufacturers is a trademark infringement action. Typically, however, illicit sellers raise the “First Sale Doctrine” as a defense to those actions. This paper explains why a pre-litigation material differences strategy is critical to prevailing in later Federal trademark actions.
Trademark Material Differences Matter
With the explosion of E-Commerce over the past decade, many manufacturers are plagued with unauthorized sellers peddling their products in online marketplaces. The principle legal remedy available to these manufacturers is a trademark infringement action. Typically, however, illicit sellers raise the “First Sale Doctrine” as a defense to those actions. This paper explains why a pre-litigation material differences strategy is critical to prevailing in later Federal trademark actions.
The Amazon Buy Box Effect
With the explosion of E-Commerce over the past decade, many manufacturers are plagued with unauthorized sellers peddling their products in online marketplaces. The principle legal remedy available to these manufacturers is a trademark infringement action. Typically, however, illicit sellers raise the “First Sale Doctrine” as a defense to those actions. This paper explains why a pre-litigation material differences strategy is critical to prevailing in later Federal trademark actions.
Navigating Uncharted Waters-The Walmart/Jet Impact
By way of example, compared to the 97 million page visits to Amazon.com each day, Walmart.com currently earns a paltry 5.7 million. Given its $485 billion market value, however, it is easy to see why the company has rested on its laurels with respect to online sales. That is, until now. To many industry watchers, the first signal of Walmart’s growing seriousness with respect to E-Commerce was its 2016 purchase of the up-and-coming E-tailer, Jet.com. Jet was an interesting purchase for Walmart. A relative newcomer to the market, Jet doesn’t boast impressive page visits (just over 100,000 a day) and has yet to turn a profit.
Think Unauthorized Sellers Can't Be Found...Think Again
For nearly a decade, E-Enforce™ (and its sister company, Cyber Investigation Services™) has been laser-focused on helping brands and manufacturers identify and take down those who improperly, fraudulently, and criminally use the internet to exploit brands for their own profit. Through the years, as E-Commerce has proliferated, we have witnessed an explosive emergence to two types of cyber-offenders: unauthorized sellers and counterfeiters. And, as time progressed, we have seen these offenders become more technically sophisticated and more likely to be hiding far away from the U.S. marketplaces where they derive the bulk of their profits.
Tackling The Counterfeit Problem On Amazon
Perhaps at no time in history, however, has the counterfeiting trade exploded like it has since the advent of the internet and the dawn of the E-Commerce era. When you add to that the global nature of today’s economy, you have the recipe for a counterfeiting crisis. Indeed, the statistics bear this out. According to the International Trademark Association (“INTA”), over $450 billion worth of phony products were bought and sold worldwide in 2016 alone. Perhaps predictably, many of these sales were completed via the internet. Unfortunately, the problem is not anticipated to go away any time soon. INTA, along with the International Chamber of Commerce, predict that counterfeit sales will top $2 trillion by 2022.
Distribution Leakage-Why It Matters
Distributors have long been an essential component of the American sales channel. These intermediaries between the manufacturer and the consumer play several critical roles in the sales process, including warehousing, shipping, promotions, and sales to retailers. Their ingrained relationships with regional or national chains are often the catalyst for a brand’s success. For as long as there have been distributors, however, there has been distributor leakage. This can be as simple as a distributor employee pilfering product samples for his own use, or as devastating as cargo thieves heisting truckloads of products from a rest stop. Whatever the method, distributor leakage can be costly for brands in a variety of ways.
The Grey Market Maze
If you ask anyone in your in-house Intellectual Property team what the black market is, they’ll probably come up with a pretty good answer. The black market involves the manufacture and sale of counterfeit products. Now ask them about the grey market. Chances are they’ll have no idea what you’re talking about or, if they do, they won’t be able to explain it well. That’s because the concept of the grey market, while heavily regulated, is often misunderstood. At its core, the grey market involves three things: (1) the importation of genuine products from outside the United States; (2) those products bear a legitimate trademark owned by a U.S. citizen or entity; and (3) the trademark owner has not given consent for importation. The permeations of this scenario are vast, as are the federal regulations that dictate how grey market goods are handled by customs officials.
