Navigating the Amazon: An IP Lawyer Who Defends Online Marketplace Sellers

John Reed: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. We try to deliver great audio with every episode, but sometimes the weather, home studio environments, and the tech gods throw us curveballs. We experienced some of those issues while recording this episode, so our apologies for the less-than-perfect sound.

[00:00:20] Now on with the show.

[00:00:31] On July 5th, 1994, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon. If you were around then, you may have had the same skepticism that many others did. A place to buy books on the internet? Why not just go to your local bookstore? Now more than 30 years later, Amazon is "the everything store," according to Brad Stone's book of the same name, and there aren't a whole lot of local bookstores around anymore.

[00:00:57] But not only can you, as a buyer, get just about any product you want from Amazon. You, as a seller, can peddle your products on the platform, so long as you play by the rules. If you think about the e-commerce ecosystem, you think of Amazon first, along with eBay, Etsy, Walmart, and others. Although they have their own terms of service and policies, they and the individuals and companies doing business on their platforms still must comply with the law.

[00:01:26] Lance Johnson is the solo practitioner behind Johnson Legal in Fairfax, Virginia. He focuses his practice on a full range of intellectual property matters, and there's a story about how he landed on IP, but he's also the go-to sticky lawyer for online sellers. It's not what he envisioned for his practice coming out of law school. How could he? The internet didn't exist yet. But when an e-seller under his own roof encountered a serious legal challenge, a niche was born.

[00:01:55] Hi Lance. Welcome to the podcast.

Lance Johnson: [00:01:57] Nice to be here.

John Reed: [00:01:59] You practice both, and I'm going to call it hard IP, involving patents, and soft IP —trademarks, copyright, licensing, etc. And like many IP attorneys, you have an undergraduate degree in engineering, chemical engineering. Did you plan on an IP law career in college? And if so, did you envision this broad practice that you have?

Lance Johnson: [00:02:23] In the, in the later part of my college career, yes, IP became a thing for me. Um, it was based on an experience I had had earlier when I was acting as a photographer for a local company who had gotten involved in a patent infringement lawsuit, and they needed somebody who could take photographs for them of the phenomenon that was occurring.

[00:02:49] The particular patent had to do with the fluorescence of fishing line under water more than 10 feet. So, I had to become a certified scuba diver, get equipment to take pictures underwater, and did all that. And then we went to a very nice, clear water tropical place and did some diving with the patent law expert to document the performance of that line. On the boat to and from the dive spot, I got an opportunity to chat with this expert. I was, you know, not yet in college. I was trying to figure out where I was going to take my career, and he painted a portrait of a really interesting profession. And it stuck with me.

[00:03:34] So when college time came around, I was a chemical engineer during the heydays of chemical engineering when every graduate was getting 15 offers. And then the year I graduated, the recession hit, and those numbers of offers dropped substantially. And so, I started looking around at my options because I wasn't really interested in going into sales support. So, patent law and IP looked like it was the thing for me because it was intriguing. 

[00:04:04] By definition, every day is something new. Kind of the same framework, different topics. So, the patent office was hiring. I became an examiner, went to law school at night, graduated, um, joined a small law firm, getting ready to go to trial. We went to trial. I joined a somewhat larger law firm after the small one, got married, and then the internet came along.

[00:04:31] And my wife— I had met her at the patent office. She was also a patent examiner—and she had a yearn to open her own shop and be her own boss. And so, she started selling on eBay. One of my greatest regrets is not getting in on the eBay friends and family stock offering sale when they came out, but you know, water under the bridge.

[00:04:51] So she started expanding. She ultimately got to Amazon. It was common at that time, something called retail arbitrage, where sellers will hit the local sales, typically at the big box stores. In this case, the product happened to come from Target, and she bought a bunch of product. It was kind of a hot Christmas toy. It was WowWee toys, made the product, and she resold those.

[00:05:16] Well, WowWee apparently took some exception to that. They filed complaints against her, alleging that the products she was selling were counterfeit. Of course, that dramatically affected her standing with Amazon and her business.

[00:05:31] So she turned to me and said, "What can we do?" I said, "Well, we can file suit." I'm a lawyer. I know how to do that. Turns out that accusing somebody of trafficking in counterfeit goods is accusing them of a felony, and that accusation constitutes a per se defamation. So, we filed suit. Nobody else had done this. So, it was the first suit in the nation, and we settled it on favorable terms. It didn't hurt that, at the hearing on defendant's motion to dismiss, the judge turned to the defendants and said, “Why hasn't this case settled? You've destroyed her business. She doesn't seem like she did anything wrong. Why are we here?” And we ended up settling two days later.

[00:06:16] But to your question is, could I have envisioned that path in high school and college? Absolutely not. I go with where the technology flows, and because of the background in education—chemical engineering is really good at teaching somebody how to think in systems—like concepts.

John Reed: [00:06:38] And then add the thinking as a lawyer on top of that. 

Lance Johnson: [00:06:41] Legal framework is just another system that has its unique particularities. So, you combine those two together and it makes for a real interesting practice and a real interesting life.

John Reed: [00:06:52] Let's go back. Apart from the reputational damage that your wife experienced because of the defamation and the counterfeit claim, did Amazon take any action? Did it relegate her or somehow punish her for the claims against her? Because I know that can be a thing, and I'm just kind of curious if that happened.

Lance Johnson: [00:07:14] The way Amazon works, as far as we know, and they're not particularly good about being transparent and forthcoming about how all these processes work internally at Amazon, her reputation took a hit. Now they have something called the account health rating that helps to measure that. They didn't at that time. They deactivated the listings, so that she couldn't sell her product on those, which needed to be resolved. And she wasn't suspended, but she was threatened with suspension. When Amazon threatens a seller with suspension, they suspend as to all the products they're selling, not just those that they're accused of.

[00:07:52] So if there are two products or three products at issue, but your larger portfolio is 2000 SKUs and you're making a million dollars a month. She wasn't. But for hypothetical, all of that is at jeopardy. The loss of reputation and trust between Amazon and the seller can be significant, particularly for something important like that.

John Reed: [00:08:15] So we've talked about your first client, which was an easy client to originate. How did this practice grow? You do other things, and I know that you do them well, but I'm obviously very curious to learn about this e-commerce ecosystem representation that you have.

Lance Johnson: [00:08:32] Sure. Before I filed suit, I had been in touch with an Amazon seller consultant that I had come to know, and asked him, I said, "Would you be interested in filing suit with me on this and helping me pursue this case?" And he kind of hemmed and hawed and said, "Nah, not really right for us, variety of reasons." But he chose not to do it.

[00:08:56] When I ended up settling the case and having it fairly successful, and because we published it on social media—it wasn't going to result in a written opinion. So, we put it up on social media, and there is a surprisingly vibrant seller group on at least among others, Facebook. And there's four or five different groups there. But we posted it on a couple of them, and that started getting some traction. The seller consultants that I met through that have become a source of mutual referrals. They refer IP issues to me because they're not generally IP attorneys. So I can write an opinion, I can help them, help the seller get through the Amazon maze, and determine whether there's actually infringement or not infringement and document that appropriately. But I also don't help sellers with run-of-the-mill complaints that they get with Amazon or help reinstate their accounts if something bad happens. I refer those back out.

[00:09:56] So we each have our own lane, and we work together to help the client. And establishing that network of referrals has been tremendously helpful to my practice. And I like to think that it's also been helpful to my clients who come to me, who have an issue, that sell on Amazon or eBay or Etsy, to get some relief that they need because none of those platforms is particularly transparent.

John Reed: [00:10:24] That's interesting. The idea that you were a pioneer. It wasn't a published opinion, as you say, but you were able to promote it at that early stage. That's really interesting stuff to that community. So, I would imagine being first had a big impact on your brand, being able to promote yourself nationally.

Lance Johnson: [00:10:47] I think it did. It also gave sellers at that time hope. At the earliest days of Amazon, when they set up this counterfeit complaint system, IP infringement reporting, I'm using that as a shorthand term for complaint. There wasn't a whole lot a seller could do if somebody accused them of selling counterfeits.

[00:11:08] I mean, at that time, Amazon was accepting receipts from distributors and stores to show authenticity and genuineness of the product. But when those policies started changing and Amazon started modifying its programs without a whole lot of notice or clarity, Amazon sellers were fairly stuck because how do you clear your reputation against somebody who's made these allegations you know are patently false?

[00:11:36] Amazon won't help you, because they have their own needs and they really don't want to get involved in legal process. So, what do you do? It turns out filing these lawsuits was really the only way to get the court involved. And yes, it's expensive. Yes, it tends to segregate out smaller sellers who can't afford the legal fees or who receive only one or two complaints, or who have sales that are not sufficiently high to justify a high likely award for damages and therefore a contingency fee case. I want to say it's grossly unfair, but it's the unfortunate economics of the situation.

John Reed: [00:12:14] Let me ask this question. It probably would benefit those listening to break this down a little bit. What does Amazon, and I think you also have represented clients with Walmart, Etsy, eBay. I would imagine their terms of service all differ, but what do they require from a seller to get started? I've got product, I want to sell it on the platform, what do I need to do? And maybe that's where those Amazon consultants come in. How onerous or boilerplate are all these terms of service, such that I may or may not know what I'm getting into?

[00:12:48] Lance Johnson: Platforms other than Walmart and Amazon are fairly easy to get started on. EBay, you just have to sign up. Buyer and seller accounts are exactly the same thing. No special requirements. Etsy, easy to be a buyer. I'm not sure how to become a seller there. I've not heard of problems with it from any of my clients.

[00:13:07] Walmart and Amazon have a fairly detailed application and identity verification process. If a seller is interested in getting involved in either of those platforms, I strongly recommend that they establish either a corporate entity or an LLC and register that upfront. You'll need to establish a bank account in the name of that entity. You'll need to get some credentials that are government-issued to show that it is, in fact, a real entity.

[00:13:38] In both Walmart and Amazon, as far as I'm aware, some product categories require prior approval from the platform to be able to sell. And that can be from a variety of reasons. Often, it's because the brand has indicated that only certain sellers should be permitted. So, there's that process to go through.

[00:14:00] On Amazon, identity verification is something that even once you sign all the forms, you have to go through that process, and it can be a fairly substantial process, including tax returns and copies of local utility bills. It looks a lot like getting a passport, so you gotta come prepared for a fair amount. And that occurs after you've been approved, after you've filed your application on Amazon, they'll approve your application and then suspend your account while they go through a 10 80 verification. The seller's gotta know that it's coming because otherwise it's like, “Hey, what's going on? You approve me, and now suddenly I'm suspended.” Uh, it's, it's all part of their process.

John Reed: [00:14:41] Two-part question here. When are most of your clients coming to you? At what stage of their e-commerce lifecycle? Is it when a dispute happens? Or are you also getting those people that are looking to become sellers, and they want help with the incorporation, and the filing, and maybe even the application?

Lance Johnson: [00:15:01] I get them later, much later in the process. My clients typically are established sellers who have a store, they have a product slate, they have sourcing, and something has happened. Somebody has filed an IP report against them that requires that they respond. Maybe they need to know, is this a good complaint? I've been selling this for a couple years now. Do I have a chance of beating this? Is it, in fact, infringing, or is it not infringing? How can we document and establish that, and try to persuade Amazon to reconsider its position? Much of that process of getting Amazon to reconsider is at the discretion of the reviewer on Amazon.

[00:15:42] I try to tell sellers, look, these guys and gals have maybe 30 seconds to make a decision, and it's easier for them to deny your request than it is to grant the request and reinstate you. So, you're going to get a lot of denials because it's easier. They won't really respond to an email saying, “what do you really need from this,” because I get a boilerplate response. That doesn't tell me anything. Amazon does offer, for a fee, services of a selling partner, not a partner. It's like a contact inside Amazon who can actually explain what's going on.

John Reed: [00:16:20] But you have to pay extra, huh?

Lance Johnson: [00:16:21] Oh, yeah. And you have to pay a proportion of their annual salary, and it typically can be on the $20,000 to $40,000 a year side. So, you're not going to do that if you're a small seller with a couple of products. If you're selling $2 million a month, it may make some sense.

John Reed: [00:16:39] Well, you gotta pay for that Venetian wedding somehow.

Lance Johnson: [00:16:42] Absolutely. 

John Reed: [00:16:43] So we, we've talked about infringement. We've talked about defamation, accusations of counterfeit. What else is in the bag of disputes that you're handling or that you're seeing? And are there new ones that are kind of on the frontier that are popping up that haven't before?

Lance Johnson: [00:16:59] Well, Amazon's reporting system, and I cite to Amazon because they have the most developed and mature system. The other platforms, Walmart and Etsy, they will entertain complaints, but they don't have a formal submission mechanism that's as mature and nailed down as Amazon's. And some of that is the size of its platform. Some of it's the underlying technology.

[00:17:24] But in the Amazon platform, they have a website where all IP reports of infringement have to pass through. Some sellers can file through brand registry, once they verify that they're an owner or working on behalf of a trademark owner. Generally, the format for those is very similar, as I understand it, for the IP infringement report, where you click the dropdown box, you pick what you want. You have the opportunity to put in some additional comments and attachments. You don't have to. Internally at Amazon, as I understand it, they don't substantively review the nature of those allegations. They just check the boxes to make sure that all the little boxes have been checked and the right magic words have been said. And then they presume it to be true, and it's between the seller and the complainant thereafter.

John Reed: [00:18:19] What I find interesting about the Amazon ecosystem is it is quite expansive, but Amazon does not want to be the arbiter. Amazon does not want to provide the tribunal for disputes, for the most part. And what it sounds like is even when they are involved, the people that are making the decisions are more likely to say no. And then you're forced to do things in court or outside of their ecosystem to protect your clients. Is that a fair assessment?

Lance Johnson: [00:18:45] Yeah, and I have a working theory on why that probably is.

[00:18:49] Sales through the internet and on Amazon, in particular, are based on trust. Early days of the internet, somebody would buy something, and they would be afraid of or get junk that it wasn't shown or described and/or was smaller or was cheaper or badly manufactured. And that diminishes trust. And if trust is diminished from those sorts of sales because you can't see it, you can't pick it up, you can't hold it in your hand before you plunk down the money. If you lose trust, you lose sales. And if you lose sales, you lose market. Your selling platform no longer becomes viable.

[00:19:26] So all of the websites have to ensure or do something to ensure trust between the buyers and the sellers. It does work with sellers, too. You have to trust that the buyer is going to pay the money, that they, in fact, are going to use the product, that if there is a problem with it, sellers will stand behind it, but they're not going to refund money if you send back a box with a brick in it unless you bought a brick.

[00:19:56] So Amazon's involvement in the IP space is an issue of trust building with the brands of the products that are sold on Amazon. Rather than get sued in court participating in the sale of counterfeit products, they want to make sure that there is some avenue for the brands to help to police their products and the quality of their products and take action against bad actors. So getting involved in lengthy disputes about some, whether something is or isn't an infringement of somebody else's patent, that's a complicated overhead process that would only cost the participants money. Amazon does not want to be involved in that.

John Reed: [00:20:41] From what you've described, it sounds like the trust factor is somewhat weighted towards or caters to the buying public. And I guess what I mean by that is, if the knee jerk reaction in a counterfeit allegation, at least at one point in time, was to penalize the seller, if there's a process because of negative reviews or rates of return or what have you, as a seller, your products may not be featured as highly.

[00:21:11] I'm kind of wondering if they tilt towards the idea that you can't have a marketplace without buyers, and we’ve got enough sellers. We gotta keep that trust with the people that, that could go elsewhere to buy what they need. Walmart or a brick-and-mortar operation.

Lance Johnson: [00:21:24] Opinions can differ on this, but from what I've seen about the way, certainly on Amazon, that the system operates, the system is skewed against the seller and in favor of the complainant. And the primary reason for that is that when a report of infringement is filed, the complainant doesn't have to provide any actual evidence. They don't have to certainly meet the preponderance of the evidence test like you would in court. It can make the allegation without even having done a test buy, or an analysis of the product, or submission of claim charts showing infringement. Although they make those reports under penalty of perjury, there's no built-in mechanism to penalize a complainant who files a false complaint.

[00:22:11] And so false complaints as a competitive manipulation tool are commonplace. For the seller, however, many of whom have the vast majority of their sales overall through the Amazon platform, the consequences can be devastating. Because their business can be suspended, their entire livelihood stripped away, without the real ability through Amazon to contest that in a meaningful way.

[00:22:38] If there's a patent infringement report, the statute provides at least in court a whole bunch of ways to challenge the validity and applicability of that patent. Amazon has two. You have to show that either you don't infringe, and again, that's a subjective determination, that explaining that to a reviewer on the seller performance team can be a challenge. The other way is to show that that particular product that was accused of infringement was on sale on Amazon more than one year before the patent application was filed, because Amazon can double-check that in their own records, in their own listing. Those are two very narrow ways to avoid infringement. Under the statutes, like I said, there's a whole lot of different ways to challenge that. In my opinion, it's skewed against the seller.

John Reed: [00:23:30] You were a pioneer on behalf of your wife, and then obviously representing others. Tell me more about what you consider to be your greatest hits, just things of which you're particularly proud that you've been able to do in this space.

Lance Johnson: [00:23:42] Well, of the stuff I could talk about, certainly that lawsuit involving her and establishing the notion that filing a false report of counterfeit on Amazon can constitute a viable defamation claim. That was rather reaffirming, I think. The notion that traditional legal principles still apply, even though the context and the forum has changed, the old rules still work.

[00:24:10] I did get involved in an arbitration with Amazon on behalf of a seller over some withheld funds and some summary determinations that the product he was selling weren't genuine. And Amazon went forward and withheld all of his inventory and sales proceeds that they were going to distribute for all of his products. So, we thought that to be unfair. We went to arbitration, and we presented our case, and got a written opinion from the arbitrator. Amazon has agreed this opinion is not confidential, so I can discuss it. But that opinion held that that practice of withholding seller funds unrelated to the products that were involved is unlawful under Washington state law. And that the seller is entitled to a full refund of the monies withheld. They also awarded the fees for the cost of the proceeding, or at least for those that were proportional to the judgment of the arbitrator.

John Reed: [00:25:13] Is AI having any impact on the relationship the seller has with Amazon? Disputes between sellers and brands? Amazon's representation of products on its platform?

Lance Johnson: [00:25:25] Yes. Amazon is starting to use more AI to help write listings for products. Unfortunately, Amazon's not terribly good about fact-checking whether those listings that are so produced are accurate. And so, a listing may go up that is replete with errors, some obvious, some not. And if other sellers list products for sale under those faulty listings, it can create problems. 

John Reed: [00:25:58] Let me interrupt here because this is interesting. I, as the seller, is it not my responsibility to provide the product description? I'm confused as to why Amazon would be drafting the product descriptions.

Lance Johnson: [00:26:09] Okay, let's back up. On eBay, the seller is responsible for all the pictures and all the text of every listing. On Walmart and Amazon, that's not the same way. Certainly, on Amazon, the text of a listing is common for all sellers, and it is generally controlled by the owner of the brand of the product that's involved.

[00:26:36] So if you're a private label seller and you've got a product that's your brand, you control the listing. You control what it says. If you are a branded product, you still control the listing, and every other seller who wants to sell that product is subject to the same content of the listing that is controlled by the brand. And whether you are controlled by an existing listing is determined by the SKU of the product, the SKU. Amazon classifies things that way. So, it can only have one listing for one SKU.

[00:27:09] Some sellers try to get around that by bundling products. If you're selling horseshoes and you want to sell one horseshoe, that's one SKU, one listing. But if you want to sell four, that's a bundle, and it might not have the same SKU. And so, they make up a new SKU. It's a new listing, different content. And so that notion of bundling is a way around that. But that one SKU description of the branded product is controlled by the brand owner through the brand registry, and they're the only ones who have the ability to change the content and the pictures.

[00:27:46] There is some mischief that can occur and has occurred in existing listings where the text or pictures suddenly are changed even though others are on the listing. Either the brand owner does it to mess up everybody else, or a bad actor third party has found a way to hack the Amazon system to get in to make that change.

[00:28:10] And these computer systems are all internationally linked, so you never really know where the mischief is occurring or how it occurred. And Amazon goes to great lengths to try to investigate things. And there have been some reported prosecutions of folks hacking Amazon listings and doing bad things, or bribing Amazon employees in order to get in and change or modify a listing.

[00:28:36] And then there's something called listing hijacking. Let's say you've been selling shampoo for 10 years and it's got a great reputation. It's got a good product rating. Suddenly that listing changes to squeaky toys. It's now been hijacked by somebody else who's changed the picture in the listing. But the rating continues . And so, when you look at the rating and what it's for, that historical rating is for an entirely different product that has nothing to do with the current product. And all of the sellers who were selling shampoos suddenly now find themselves on a listing for squeaky toys and ostensibly open to a charge of trademark infringement or selling products not as described.

[00:29:18] So it's a constant vigilance issue that, being a seller, you can't really trust that things are going to stay the same once you've got them up there, because mischief occurs.

John Reed: [00:29:29] Let's go back to the AI that Amazon is employing here. 

Lance Johnson: [00:29:32] Amazon is also a seller of products, often in competition with the other sellers that have been there, which raises interesting other issues because Amazon has its access to all the sales information, so they know what's hot and what to sell anyway.

[00:29:46] They use AI to generate listings to describe a product. Sometimes those listings are entirely accurate. Nothing is amiss because it's an accurate description. But in one instance that I'm aware of, it was about a haircare product, and it was describing the volume of the shampoo as 8.19999999 ounces. Obviously not correct because nobody makes it like that. It had some sellers on the listing, and when the brand went to try to enforce that, it created some issues trying to get the text corrected or taken down.

[00:30:23] But yes, Amazon does use it, and it may or may not be accurate. And all I can say is buyer beware. I mean, if it looks like it makes no sense, it probably makes no sense, and you may not know what you're getting. 

John Reed: [00:30:39] One last question I'll ask you, or one last area I want to get into is, you've been very, very involved in the American Bar Association. I'd love to have you talk about what the ABA has done for you, what it's provided for you, and what you've given to it.

Lance Johnson: [00:30:54] The ABA for me, I've been active in both the Science and Technology Law Section, and I'm currently active in the Law Practice Management Division. Both of those divisions had professionals and lawyers in them who provided a collegial atmosphere. Certainly, interesting subject matter to work on of interest.

[00:31:17] In the early days, the Science and Technology Law Division, I was involved in when the internet was becoming a thing, and one of the issues that we faced and addressed is, well, how do judges and lawyers deal with electronic publication of opinions, and how do you cite to that? Other issues like that, and electronic evidence, and how audio files can be manipulated with suitable software, so that “I didn't kill my wife” suddenly becomes, “I did kill my wife. On Saturday.” And we had a very impressive demonstration of that at a program that I attended, where people who are familiar with the software they made that change. They recorded something from the audience that somebody said, they modified it as we sat there, and then they replayed it. That had exactly the opposite meaning

John Reed: [00:32:16] The birth of the deepfake.

Lance Johnson: [00:32:17] Yes. The topic of the conversation was how do you know whether something is authentic and how do you prove it or disprove it? And that was one of the issues facing the industry at the time. And I think frankly, it still is. And deepfakes only enhance that problem. The notion of a political deepfake affecting an election is not if, but when.

[00:32:39] In the Law Practice Management Division, it's an outlet for me to— you know, I manage a firm of one right now. I used to be in another firm where I was more involved in management of a group. Never been in big law where I had hundreds. And, but certainly in mid-law, where you’ve got 25 attorneys, I've been involved in management decisions for them, and I enjoy that process of helping to pick policies that get the most out of the lawyers. Because not every lawyer has the same strengths in being able to identify what those strengths are and use them to greatest effect and advantage of the law firm is a fascinating process. It's an outlet I really enjoy working with. I'm now active on the Law Practice Management magazine, where we do it six times a year in articles.

John Reed: [00:33:33] Nobody teaches law practice management or business of law at a law school, so it's a very, very valuable resource.

Lance Johnson: [00:33:40] Yes. And they should, I mean, the number of new law firms that are started that come out. The learning curve is woefully steep.

John Reed: [00:33:50] It is. Your shingle doesn't come with a manual.

Lance Johnson: [00:33:53] No. You have to learn on the fly, or you join a firm to learn how that all works. And then only later, do you have really the expertise on the client base to hang out your own shingle.

John Reed: [00:34:04] So, Lance, as we wrap up, in the ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure department, what advice would you give to online sellers for whatever platform? What else are critical factors or things to watch out for?

Lance Johnson: [00:34:20] Probably the single most important, and the one that I run into most often for most sellers, is that the seller is absolutely responsible for the authenticity of their product supply chain. And if pushed, the seller is responsible for coming forward with evidence to show that the folks they bought their product from are authorized and selling genuine products.

[00:34:50] I know that that is not necessarily the most profitable way to proceed, but it is the safest if you want to safeguard your account. Because if you do go to arbitration, I can guarantee you Amazon's counsel will point to that area of the Controlling Business Solutions agreement, where it says that the seller is responsible for selling authentic products. You need to build that in now. If a deal sounds too good to be true, it's too good to be true.

[00:35:24] If you've never bought from a particular source before and they're offering an attractive price that's even slightly better than what your trusted source has been selling you, be wary. Ask for proof of authenticity and a supply relationship from the brand, because you're going to need that ultimately. Your defense to a third-party infringement complaint, you need that authorization. You need to paper your product supply chain to guarantee authenticity.

John Reed: [00:35:52] So buyer beware applies to sellers as well, where they're getting their product from.

Lance Johnson: [00:35:57] Absolutely. Absolutely. Unless you're the actual manufacturer of the product, it means you gotta trust somebody. “Trust but verify” is still a watchword and still a thing.

John Reed: [00:36:08] Lance, thanks for sharing your story and your expertise with us. It's been a fascinating inside look, and I've really learned a lot.

Lance Johnson: [00:36:15] Well, thank you for having me, John.

John Reed: [00:36:21] Listeners, if you're streaming this over Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or another platform, please take a moment to click the follow or subscribe button if you haven't done so already. I mean, why would you want to miss future episodes, right? And if you're really feeling it, please give us a review and a rating. We'd like to hear from you about what we're doing.

[00:36:41] Until next time, I'm John Reed, and you've been listening to Sticky Lawyers.