Someone, somewhere is laughing at me. They’re saying to themselves, “see, this is what he deserves for choosing to publish his coloring books with Amazon KDP.”
Yes, it’s an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound somehow involving a flintlock musket. It’s a Darwin Award without the award. I get it, so go ahead and be self-righteously snarky. Hindsight is 20/20. But just like Ishmael, I’m about to go down with this ship in a blaze of glory with the Amazon logo as my spear, or simply a penis-shaped logo depending on how you prefer to look at things.
The background:
Now without much further ado, here’s the background story. A few weeks ago, I discovered a 5th book of mine being on Amazon. The problem? I don’t have a fifth book. At least not yet. After digging around, it turned out that someone has been reposting thousands of authors and illustrators works by taking their books without their permission, altering them, and reselling them on Amazon as a third-party seller. The problem is that they’ve been reported numerous times over the past few years, but Amazon has knowingly done nothing whatsoever to stop this from happening.
So I filed a copyright infringement claim, ironically using the very same system that I suggested they modify and which they recently implemented, which may be a topic for a different day. After the filing, I decided I’d take things one step further and seek a trademark for an extra level of protection in order to have it registered with Amazon Brand Registry which was set up to provide additional protections for brands. A few days later, the trademark for Hello Charlie was issued for use by the USPTO.
The spiral bound copy was quickly removed from Amazon, and I mistakenly thought it would go uncontested which has always been the case in over several hundreds DMCA takedown complaints I’ve made over the years, all of which have been successful up until now. Granted, this takedown only involved my Art Nouveau Coloring Book title. Thousands of other titles from other mostly unsuspecting authors are still available on Amazon.
The latest update:
So I thought we were done, until I received this email from Amazon earlier today:
From: [email protected]
To: [redacted]
Hello,
We have received a counter-notice, from an Amazon seller, to your report(s) of posting, hosting and/or distributing unlicensed copyright protected material on our network. Below are the details of the complaint and ASIN targeted in the complaint.
Complaint ID: 15157667491
ASIN: B0D1G12N3T
Title: The Art Nouveau Coloring Book Hats Cats Vintage Romance Volume 1 A Stress Relief Relaxation Mindfulness Series For Women Men Teens
The counter notice submitted is provided below for your records. We will allow this material to become accessible, unless you provide us with notice that a lawsuit has been filed against the counter-noticing party within 10 business days. Please ensure a copy of the lawsuit is sent to [email protected] to help ensure efficient processing. Note, that if a copy of the lawsuit is not provided within 10 business days, the identified content above will be reinstated.
ASIN: B0D1G12N3T Complaint ID: 15157667491 You recently provided me with a copy of a Notice of Infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This letter is a Counter-Notification as authorized in § 512(g) of the DMCA. I have a good faith belief that the material identified in the Notice of Infringement was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled. I therefore request that the material be replaced and/or no longer disabled. The material in question formerly appeared on Amazon website with Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN): B0D1G12N3T My contact information is as follows: Full Legal Name: Orion Ventures Inc Email Address:[redacted] Mailing Address: 16182 Gothard St Ste Q .HUNTINGTON BEACH CA 92647 Phone Number: [redacted] ✔️ (I) I am located in the United States and I consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which my address is located (OR) I am located outside of the United States and I consent to the jurisdiction of any judicial district in which Amazon may be found. ✔️ (II) I agree to accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person. ✔️ (III) I have a good faith belief that the material identified in the Notice of Infringement was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled. ✔️ (IV) I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that this Counter-Notification and all statements therein are true and correct. ✔️ (V) I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT PROVIDING FALSE STATEMENTS IN A COUNTER-NOTICE MAY LEAD TO CIVIL PENALTIES OR CRIMINAL PROSECUTION. Enter your full name as a means of a digital signature. Please note that by entering your full name you are providing us with your digital signature which is legally binding. Orion Ventures Inc
Thank You,
Amazon
The response sent to me was a counter notice, again, the first time I ever received one out of the hundreds of DMCA requests I’ve had to send over the years for people stealing my works, which brings me to my next point.
It’s one thing to cease and desist, but an entirely different thing to refuse to comply. Those are potential grounds for a lawsuit against a third party, or even a class action lawsuit against Amazon itself, especially when it involves Amazon taking a cut of the proceeds from all of these unsuspecting authors all of these years and willfully looking the other way. Most attorneys (and I have spoken to many over the years) won’t even proceed until a cease and desist is issued and 99% of the time it’s resolved. Amazon and this party has been repeatedly warned by authors and has allow this practice to continue. All the warning signs have been fired on countless occasions.
The book modifier and the enabler (or mob boss depending on who you ask):
The next thing I will bring up, and the reason why I highlighted a section in their response letter is that it confirms the identity of the party another Redditor brought up 4 months ago about Personalized JoyCraft aka Orion Ventures. At first I wasn’t going to bring up that information in my blog in case it was inaccurate, but now I have no doubt that what this person said was completely true. I also figure hey, if Amazon is willing to not stick up and protect its own KDP authors and want to send that person my own personal information which is exactly what they did, then fair is fair. Again, this was a screenshot taken from someone else’s post on Reddit:
The person is identified who runs Orion Ventures LLC out of Huntington Beach, California. A further search on the address revealed the following from Moody’s Analytics, although I must caveat that I don’t know how accurate Moody’s statistics are, but the company has been around since 2007.
Notice the revenue? I said in a previous post that I believed this operation was much bigger than pretty much anyone has even realized. I provided screenshots and evidence that this was a chronic issue and just recently discovered additional, possibly separate parties engaging in this same behavior.
$10,000,000 to $25,000,000. Let that sink in for a moment. This problem is only a drop in a much bigger bucket.
Another search revealed the following data:
Notice the other interesting tidbit here? Four officers are listed. I tried registering for this site which I assume pulls the actual data from another database. However, the site was also glitchy and the confirmation email I received didn’t even work. So this was as far as I could get for now. But, I have no reason to disbelieve that this is part of a much larger operation and something I had suspected all along. Hence the formation of a LLC to protect the officers themselves from being personally sued.
Where everything currently stands:
I’m currently awaiting a response from Amazon Brand Registry after filing a complaint with them, as the usual copyright infringement system used by Amazon is inefficient and a waste of everyone’s time. I hope this division takes further action; otherwise, the very purpose of a trademarks and their registry becomes meaningless. However, it should have been evident that copyright law should have prevented it from reaching this point. It’s a matter the courts will have to decide upon, or something I had thought was already commonly practiced.
If the Brand Registry doesn’t prove helpful, which wouldn’t surprise me based on my past experiences with Amazon (and a few notable revelations I’ve yet to share), I have other strategies I’m keeping private for now. If someone wants to challenge me, they’ve picked the wrong person to try to bully.
As mentioned before, this isn’t about the money, although I believe there’s enough leverage for us as a collective to pursue both Amazon and Orion Ventures. On one hand, Amazon has harassed numerous KDP authors with removing titles (including mine) without justification only to be restored, yet has a different set of rules for third-party sellers, revealing a convenient hypocrisy. Just ask yourself, why are there clearly two different systems of rules separating KDP from the third party sellers? Why not just have one umbrella of standards for us all? Why did Amazon allow false claims of copyright infringement for The Art Nouveau Coloring Book and not provide me with the personal information of the person accusing me of infringement like they did In the email above?
I’ll tell you why—I’m published through Amazon KDP while Orion Ventures AKA Personalized JoyCraft operates separately within Amazon Sellers, a completely different division of Amazon. One department (Amazon Sellers) protects the welfare of the general population of independent businesses and seller interests while their other advertising revenue generating machine (KDP) controls the “prisoner” population such as myself, gladly raking in our advertising spendings. Amazon occasionally terrorizes authors such as myself, Julie Kitzes, and Jane Friedman to remind us on occasion who is in control, or rather they try to intimidate us. There’s really no other way to describe what they’ve done other than letting certain groups have way too much unfettered power.
And while you might argue that none of us are forced to be here, my understanding in researching how Amazon self-publishing operates is that if you’re banned from Amazon, other platforms will flat out refuse to take you own board. It almost behaves like a racket, and this is often why people are terrified to speak out. Many of us are afraid, understandably so of retribution from these heavily-biased dynamics of power. So unfortunately, we are a bit of a captive audience, which again is often ripe for systematic abuse.
I’d also guarantee that any attorney representing a KDP author could either be tied up in court for ages, bankrupting an author or the easiest solution is to “simply” settle out of court and sign away a bunch of NDAs. But Amazon attorneys will never reveal how frequently this happens. They won’t tell us how much swatting (false reporting of copyrights) there is. They wont tell me who falsely accused both me and also Julie Kitzes, amongst thousands of others. They wouldn’t tell me what was supposedly wrong with my cover after telling me there was something wrong with my cover. They won’t tell us how or why operations such as Personalized JoyCraft have been modifying and selling thousands of other authors and titles for years without being banned. They won’t tell us why they continue to allow the listing these modified books as “new” when they are clearly not (and they could easily change, although that might open up a major lawsuit against them.) They won’t show me their internal data showing general shipping information in different countries so I can match up my KDP dashboard and sales. They will not tell us the sources which brought users to their website which resulted in purchases aka conversions, although they clearly have those capabilities but rather have you spending money on ads internally. They refuse to provide us with the common decency they afford third-party sellers within their own system.
This is ALL ABOUT CONTROL. Plain and simple.
As a result of having immense wealth and setting up countless barriers of deliberate organizational red tape, Amazon has established an internal monopoly within the Kindle and Audible ecosphere, knowingly and intentionally abandoning fairness to KDP authors by removing those checks and balances separating our two sides of operation. This fight is about principle and doing what’s right for everyone involved. It’s about getting Amazon to do the right thing, taking a stand, and preventing them from becoming a corporatocracy. It is my hope that they will change for the better, but unfortunately chronic problems such as this that have been intentionally ignored for years show their outright refuseal to even actively listen, let alone care.
