Amazon marketplace faces copyright breach lawsuit

Amazon may be one of the biggest e-commerce businesses on the market, but its broad marketplace may lead them to a copyright breach lawsuit, according to the International Business Times, United Kingdom. Because the British cosmetics company does not allow Amazon to sell their products on the website, using "Lush" as a keyword to find similar products violates LUSH Cosmetics' trademark protections.

"Lush brought trademark infringement proceedings against Amazon on the basis that when the term 'Lush' was searched for on Amazon's website, the results returned were for goods which, although they featured the word 'lush' in a number of contexts, were not in fact made by Lush," according to court documents.

To ensure that Amazon could get web traffic their way, court documents mentioned that Amazon also placed a bid for the GoogleAdWord, "Lush Bath Products," even though they are not an authorized LUSH Cosmetics retailer. 

Although this copyright infringement lawsuit is slated to head to court sometime in 2014, depending on how the case ends, the Observer explains it can greatly change how "online retailers from mak[e] suggestions for alternatives [of] products that they do not sell and restrict how they use Google."

In light of this lawsuit, LUSH co-founder Mark Constantine recently told the New Review that Amazon "rushes into people's countries, it takes the money out, and dumps it in some port of convenience." Before the trial has begun, LUSH has already used more than $819,000 on its lawsuit against Amazon.

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Categorised in: Business Law

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