Bill McKenna quoted in The Information, “Amazon Tests Program to Combat Patent Infringement.”
Amazon is testing a new program that allows merchants on its marketplace who are victimized by cheap, patent-violating knockoffs to get them removed in a few months for just a few thousand dollars or less—much faster and cheaper than a typical legal process.
“When you’re looking at counterfeits, it’s easy to tell that a Louis Vuitton purse is covered by a Louis Vuitton trademark,” said William McKenna, an intellectual property lawyer at the firm Woodard, Emhardt, Henry, Reeves & Wagner in Indianapolis. “When you’re talking about patent infringement, it’s not so simple.”
Mr. McKenna said Amazon’s new utility patent program means sellers with the patents don’t have to file lawsuits against many individual companies or wait as long as a year for an order to handle them all together, which he described as subjecting sellers to “death by a thousand cuts.”