Amazon sues sellers for issuing bogus takedown requests on competitors

Amazon has filed three lawsuits against groups that it claims were abusing its takedown system by filing thousands of illegitimate copyright complaints against other products in a bid to get people to buy their merchandise instead. In an announcement on Thursday, the company calls the lawsuits a “new offensive against bad actors.”

According to the lawsuits (which you can read here, here, and here), the alleged bad actors didn’t just file fake complaints and then sit back and wait to see if they worked. Amazon says the parties also “created fake, disposable websites, with product images scraped from the Amazon store” and tried to use them as evidence that they were the legitimate copyright holders. There is a sort of dark humor here — it...

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