October 15, 2019
Mr. Daniel Lee
Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Innovation and Intellectual Property (Acting)
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
600 17 Street, NW
Washington, DC 20508
RE: 2019 Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets (Docket Number: USTR-2019-0013)
Assistant USTR Representative Lee,
Amazon submits these comments as part of the Office of the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR)
2019 Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets. Amazon’s comments respond to the
recommendations submitted by the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA) recommending
that Amazon’s stores in specific jurisdictions be included in USTR’s 2019 Notorious Markets List.
SUMMARY OF AMAZON’S ANTI-COUNTERFETING MEASURES
Amazon strives to be Earth’s most customer‐centric company, where consumers can find and discover
virtually any authentic, lawful product they want to buy. We know that customer trust is hard to win and
easy to lose, and we view counterfeiting as an existential threat: if customers do not trust what they
purchase through Amazon’s stores, they can and will shop elsewhere. That is why we go well beyond our
legal obligations and invest heavily in proactive efforts to prevent counterfeits from ever reaching our
stores. In 2018 alone, we invested over $400 million in personnel and employed over 5,000 employees to
fight fraud and abuse (including counterfeiting) in our stores. Our primary focus is on preventative,
technology‐driven tools built on machine learning and data science to proactively scan the more than 5
billion changes submitted to our worldwide catalog each day. We also stand behind the products sold
through our stores even when third‐party sellers do not. We willingly make these investments because
they are good for our customers, good for the honest entrepreneurs who account for more than 58% of
the physical gross merchandise sales made through our stores, and good for the rights owners and brands
that invent the hundreds of millions of products for sale in Amazon’s stores. These investments are
producing positive results: in 2018, our proactive efforts prevented over 1 million suspected bad actors
from publishing a single product for sale in our stores, blocked over 3 billion suspected bad listings from
being published on our stores, and ensured that over 99.9% of products that customers actually viewed
in Amazon’s stores never have received a complaint about a suspected counterfeit from a customer or
rights owner.
Our investments include unique, industry-leading innovations to prevent counterfeits from being sold in
our stores:
1. Brand Registry. This service powers proactive brand protection on Amazon. Registration is free
to any rights owner with a registered trademark, independent of any economic relationship with
Amazon. Through Brand Registry, brands gain access to powerful tools including automated brand
protections that use machine learning to predict infringement and proactively protect brands’
intellectual property.
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 These tools grow more effective over time and year to date in 2019 have proactively blocked over
400% more listings suspected of violating intellectual property (IP) rights than during the same
period in 2018. Brand Registry also provides enrollees a powerful Report a Violation tool that
increases the accuracy of brands’ notices of claimed infringement, and allows brands to search
for potentially infringing products using state‐of-the‐art image search technology. More than
200,000 brands around the world are enrolled in Brand Registry, and they are finding and
reporting 99% fewer suspected infringements than before the launch of Brand Registry.
2. Transparency. This product serialization service effectively eliminates counterfeits on enrolled
products. Amazon provides participating brands unique, 2D Data Matrix codes that brands place
on every unit they manufacture of an enrolled product. Those codes allow Amazon, other
retailers, law enforcement, and customers to determine the authenticity of each individual unit
of that product in the industry supply chain, simply by scanning the codes with a mobile app. Since
Transparency’s launch in 2018, over 6,000 brands have enrolled, enabling Amazon to protect
brands and our customers by detecting and preventing over 300,000 counterfeit products from
being sold. To date, brands have not reported a single counterfeit notice of infringement for
Transparency‐enabled products.
3. Project Zero. This new program empowers brands to help Amazon drive counterfeits to zero. It
combines the breadth and power of Amazon’s automated proactive brand protections, the
complete coverage of unit serialization, and a new self‐service tool that for the first time gives
rights owners the power to remove suspected counterfeits directly from Amazon’s stores. As of
October 2019, 6,000 brands are already enrolled in Project Zero.
4. Innovative protection of IP rights. Amazon recently launched this new program to help emerging
brands obtain trademarks and IP protection from the earliest stages of their product lifecycles.
Amazon recognized that entrepreneurs often do not think to obtain IP protection while
developing products, and often do not know where to turn when they need protection. IP
Accelerator solves this challenge by connecting businesses with a curated network of trusted IP
law firms that provide high quality trademark registration services at competitive rates to help
brands secure a trademark. Amazon has vetted the participating IP law firms for experience,
expertise, and customer service, and all have agreed to competitive, pre-negotiated rates for the
standard services involved in obtaining a trademark registration. When businesses use these law
firms to file trademark applications, Amazon provides their brands with accelerated access to
brand protection in Amazon’s stores. Brands will benefit from automated brand protections,
which proactively block bad listings from Amazon’s stores, increased authority over product data
in our store, and access to our Report a Violation tool, a powerful tool to search for and report
bad listings that have made it past our automated protections.
We recognize these tools are not perfect and we work hard to continuously improve them based on
feedback from rights owners, selling partners, and regulators. Such feedback depends upon collaborative
relationships, which also include joint lawsuits, law enforcement referrals, and working with industry
associations to create structured engagement for constructive feedback. However, despite Amazon’s best
efforts to engage with the AAFA collaborate with its members to effectively prevent the sale of
counterfeits, many of its member brands have not adopted Amazon’s brand protection tools.

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 AMAZON’S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE AMERICAN APPAREL AND FOOTWEAR ASSOCIATION (AAFA)
Since December 2018, Amazon has conducted monthly engagements with a group of brands selected by
AFAA to discuss our brand protection innovations including Brand Registry, Transparency, Project Zero
and more, share key performance indicators, and provide feedback and guidance on Amazon’s policies.
When Amazon receives negative feedback from these engagements about its policies or tools, it uses that
feedback to improve the policies and tools to address brands’ concerns. Amazon places great value on
providing this forum for brands to provide insights and suggested improvements to its tools.
The dialogue provided through these meetings has helped AAFA members adopt Amazon’s brand
protection tools, which have significantly improved the proactive IP protections provided to AAFA
members. Specifically:
1. Adoption of Brand Registry by members of AAFA’s Brand Protection Council has risen from 19%
before the monthly engagements started to 80% today.
2. This increased adoption of Brand Registry has enabled Amazon to proactively protect AAFA
members’ intellectual property on Amazon, resulting in a 75% reduction in the number of notices
of claimed infringement (of all types of IP) filed by AAFA members who participate in these
meetings for the five Amazon stores for which AAFA has recommended for inclusion on the watch
list. 1
3. For every one notice of claimed infringement that these members have submitted to Amazon
for those five stores over the past six months, Amazon has proactively removed 165 listings
suspected of infringing AAFA members’ intellectual property rights.
4. Although AAFA has recommended Amazon’s India store for inclusion on the 2019 Notorious
Markets List, these members have not filed a single notice of suspected counterfeit for Amazon’s
India store in the past six months.
Despite the demonstrated effectiveness of Amazon’s tools, however, some AAFA member brands have
refused to use them. For example, 13 members of the AAFA’s Brand Protection Council have declined to
enroll in Brand Registry; only 22 brands have enrolled in Project Zero despite 51 brands being invited, and
none have adopted Transparency. Further, AAFA did not attempt to raise or resolve the concerns in their
filing with Amazon prior to submitting them, despite the forum that the monthly meeting provides. AAFA’s
suggestion that Amazon is not doing its part to eliminate counterfeits from its stores does not stand up to
the data from Amazon’s efforts on behalf of AAFA members.

1

It is unclear why AAFA singled out these five stores. Amazon’s brand protection efforts apply globally to all of its
stores, with the exception of the limited times when Amazon tests new products in limited geographies or where
certain IP laws only apply in certain jurisdictions (e.g., parallel import laws in Europe). For example, Amazon Brand
Registry is available in all of Amazon’s stores worldwide, and Amazon engages in proactive brand protection efforts
in each of its stores where brands have registered intellectual property. Transparency is available in the United
States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, and India. Amazon launched Project Zero first in
the US, but has since expanded it to its stores in Europe and Japan.

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 CONCLUSION
The fight against counterfeits is far from over and Amazon will not stop investing in the development of
effective tools and solutions until there are zero counterfeits in its stores. Contrary to the suggestion in
AAFA’s submission, these efforts are working, as over 99.9% of the products that customer actually view
in Amazon’s stores never have received a complaint about a suspected counterfeit from a customer or
rights owner. Amazon solicits constructive feedback from brands and associations as to how it can
continue to improve those tools, make the process easier for brands, and more effectively fight
counterfeiters. However, when brands refuse to use the tools that Amazon makes available to them, offer
only anonymous criticism that is directly refuted by available data, or conflate concerns about counterfeits
with questions like the “unauthorized” distribution of authentic products, the shared goal of combatting
counterfeiting is undermined rather than enhanced. While Amazon welcomes continued feedback from
and will continue to work with AAFA to protect its members’ intellectual property in Amazon’s stores, its
submission does not reflect the efforts that Amazon has already undertaken on their behalf and does not
support Amazon’s inclusion on the 2019 Notorious Markets List.
Thank you for the opportunity to provide comments in this process.
Sincerely,

Brian Huseman
Vice President, Public Policy

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