Information provided by the client: Wholesale invoices
Affected patent rights: Briggs & Stratton IPR
Amazon has requested a preventive appeal and documents proving lack of patent infringement.
Within 72 hours, the client had to submit an appeal and documents to prove there was no patent infringements. The client only had invoices, which were clearly insufficient to prove he had rights to use the patent. Based on a review of the listings, source of purchase, and sales, we concluded that the client had no real rights to use the patent. Therefore, in the reasons for the violations we stated the following: 1. Lack of awareness of the listing evaluation processes and possible rights protecting the listing (patent, trademark and copyright). It was primarily due to lack of legal education, inattentive study of Amazon policies, and lack of a lawyer on staff. 2. Admission of guilt for patent infringement.
In the preventive part of the appeal, we detailed the new process of analyzing the listing through the available databases (USPTO, Google Patent); checking listings with professional lawyers and listing similar items only if valid approvals are available.
The appeal was accepted and prevented the account from being suspended.