How Amazon's Business Practices Have Transformed the U.S. Trademark System

What is it about?

Amazon’s dominance as a platform is widely documented. But one aspect of that dominance has not received sufficient attention—the Amazon Brand Registry’s sweeping influence on firm behavior, particularly in relation to the formal trademark system. Amazon’s Brand Registry serves as a shadow trademark system that dramatically affects businesses’ incentives to seek legal registration of their marks. Amazon’s policies also create incentives for businesses to adopt different kinds of marks, particularly descriptive or generic terms and "nonsense marks." Amazon’s impact raises profound questions for trademark law and for law more generally. We explore the ways in which Amazon’s practices affect competition, harm the trademark system, and reshape how we think about trademark law at its foundation.

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Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash