Acts of torts by Amazon [Appendix 1-20]. Amazon’s claim that the use of ‘Cath Kidston’ is an Intellectual Property Infringement (trademark violation
Because Amazon has run a private system under the name of the Amazon Brand Registry, which was made to work for their own convenience, the Intellectual Property infringement does not extend to Amazon itself.
Amazon writes Cath Kidston’s Brand Name as ‘Cath (bullet point) Kidston’ in Japanese for their own Cath Kidston brand store; however, the rights owner of Cath Kidston has not been registered as such [Claimant’s Note: see the following for more information].
In fact, the search result for ‘Cath (bullet point) Kidston’ in Japanese (see above) shows no trademark register on the J-PlatPat ( Japan Platform for Patent Information). Therefore, Amazon itself conducted a trademark violation and infringed the Intellectual Property rights of Cath Kidston as Article 4 (1) (xi) of the Trademark Act designates that unregistrable trademarks are those identical to, or even similar to, another person’s registered trademark.
The Intellectual Property infringement does not extend to Amazon because the main brand, Amazon, being registered in the Brand Registry, has been prioritised, whereas Cath Kidson, whose trademark should have been prioritised, becomes a subordinate brand. Thus, Amazon as a platformer manipulatively runs its own algorithm and conducts acts of torts by applying rights (i.e. Intellectual Property infringements) to sellers whilst excluding itself as a seller at its own discretion.
The place where sellers report acts of torts conducted by Amazon is the Legal Department of Amazon Japan, a mere branch office of Amazon.com in the US. Therefore, trademarks registered in Japan have not been treated as a highly important matter when running the business in Japan for Amazon.co.jp, as a consequence of which many sellers – including the Claimant, who had no choice but to seek expensive legal advice from lawyers and patent attorneys only to receive the same reply with astonishment (‘Your item was removed for such an unreasonable reason?’) – have suffered damages. By contrast, Amazon itself carries out outrageous activities. These include 1) rewriting the Seller Code of Conduct without informing sellers when an inconvenient truth was pointed out to it by the Claimant; 2) applying the privilege that only Amazon as a seller can sell items which are banned according to the Seller Code of Conduct; 3) discarding a seller’s genuine item as a counterfeit [Claimant Note: The item being accused as a counterfeit by Amazon proved to be a genuine item when sufficient documents were provided] by ignoring not only Japanese Law but also US Law; and 4) being informed by a seller that [Amazon] ‘selling purchased items from sellers without paying the consumption tax constitutes a potentially unlawful activity’.
Read about this in more detail: Claimant’s Brief 12 (pp.12-16)
