יום: 7 במאי 2024

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 thingsNow 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 fleecing thousands of authors and illustrators by stealing their works 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 at least 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 by the USPTO.The unauthorized 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 as the thousands of other titles from other mostly unsuspecting authors is still up on Amazon.So I thought we were done, until I received this email from Amazon earlier today:From: no-replies-appeal@amazon.comTo: 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: 15157667491ASIN: B0D1G12N3TTitle: The Art Nouveau Coloring Book Hats Cats Vintage Romance Volume 1 A Stress Relief Relaxation Mindfulness Series For Women Men TeensThe 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 ip-info-request@amazon.com 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: personalizedjoycrafts@gmail.com Mailing Address: 16182 Gothard St Ste Q .HUNTINGTON BEACH CA 92647 Phone Number: 16143300618 ✔️ (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 IncThank 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 when you’re clearly in the wrong. Those are solid 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. This is brazen behavior combined with gross negligence. Amazon and this party has been repeatedly warned and allow this pattern of abuse to continue. All the warning signs have been fired on countless occasions.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: The identity is a person named Nhan Tran 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, which I personally feel this is another in a long line of legal grifts that shouldn’t be allowed to mask potential crimes. As for next steps, I am awaiting a response from Amazon Brand Registry as I filed a complaint with them since the normal copyright infringement system Amazon uses is a complete and utter useless waste of everyone’s time. Hopefully this division can take further action, otherwise the whole point of a Trademark is completely meaningless, although the obviousness of copyright law should have prevented it from getting this far in the first place. If Brand Registry proves utterly useless, which I wouldn’t be surprised at this point given how incompetent the rest of Amazon has clearly demonstrated, I have a few other cards which I’m holding close to my chest for now. If this person really wants to mess around, he’s going to be in for a world of something else that will shutter him once and for all. As I said before, it’s not about the money although I think there’s enough water to possibly squeeze from both Amazon’s and Orion Venture’s stones. This is about principle and doing what’s only right for everyone involved. It’s getting Amazon to

יְוֹם: 7 במאי 2024

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