In the US, trademarks are often protected via registration with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Trademarks can also be registered in individual states.
Amazon offers an additional level of protection for online sales with its own Amazon Brand Registry.
According to the Amazon website,
Your enrollment in the Amazon Brand Registry provides access to powerful tools including proprietary text and image search, predictive automation based on your reports of suspected intellectual property rights violations, and increased authority over product listings with your brand name.
Amazon accepts for registration
active word marks or graphical trademarks with a text component (words, letters, or numbers) that have been issued by government patent and trademark offices in the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
Registration with Amazon is a fairly simple process. Applicants must provide a trademark registration number, a list of product categories, a link to a brand website, a list of countries where the products are made and distributed, and images of the logo, products, and packaging.
After this process is completed, Amazon sends a verification code to the law firm that filed the trademark. The trademark owner can then use that code to finalize the registration process with Amazon.
Registering a brand with Amazon can help protect a trademark owner from competition from unauthorized and counterfeit resellers.
Amazon sells over half a billion types of products, and about half of all online purchases are made via Amazon. As on many other online marketplaces, counterfeit products are sometimes offered for sale on Amazon via independent resellers.
Amazon offers IP owners the ability to search by product name, ASIN, ISBN, brand name, keyword, or image to detect unauthorized sales and then report violations of their IP rights.
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