Ryan Hogue Passive Income Podcast

Hey guys, thanks for joining me today. I'm here with Melvin friend of the channel and I'm going to tell you straight away. You got to save his contact, all right? You know I've been selling e-commerce for almost eight years now and the number of times I've needed somebody like Melvin, he's the owner of JustTech brand protection, he provides legal services to e-commerce sellers. I've needed Melvin before I knew him so many times. He's going to be talking about, well, essentially we want to talk about some really cool stuff that's been happening in the e-commerce space. But first Melvin, do you mind just kind of sharing like your services that you offer and whatnot? Yeah, yeah. Thanks, right. Glad to be back into the channel, it's been a while. So yeah, so you know, JustTech brand protection, we're a private company that assists online businesses with all types of issues, specifically IP related issues. So if you're struggling with copyright or trademark theft, or if you're being accused of copyright or trademark theft, we're able to intervene and provide a solution for you. We also assist with Amazon and its ear country and statements, domain name disputes and Amazon arbitration, so yeah, that's effectively what we do at the moment. We have expanded our services through our law firm partners in Orlando, through which we're able to do federal court litigation now. So if you do find that your store account has been suspended due to a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction, we're also able to assist you in having that uplifted. Thanks, man. And as I mentioned, like I've been at this, I've been in the game for a long time. You've helped me with getting some IP infringement accusations removed, so I can attest to that firsthand. And then prior to me, knowing you existed, I've definitely had to hire other lawyers and stuff in the past for a, you know, variety of things. And then, you know, if you've been selling on, you know, print on demand for any amount of time, you know that like you're going to get people that accuse you of whatever. And sometimes it's worth fighting. Sometimes it's not. You said account reinstating, by the way, Q4, typically right before Q4. So like I would say September and into October is like the time that Amazon goes after seller accounts. So this is like the time of year. I've dealt with this. It was probably like five years ago at this point, but I've dealt with this. I had a single duplicate title in my Amazon seller central. The penalty for a single duplicate title is a permanent suspension from Amazon. So it's insane, man. The amount of money I had to spend to fight against that, dude. Yeah. Yeah, I think what happens is this is during Q4, there's a lot of fake stores that tend to come up because a lot of, you know, people who have bad intentions want to take advantage of this Christmas period. So you get a lot of these fake stores. I think Amazon tends to be a little bit hyper aggressive during this period. And it's the same thing for Etsy, Walmart and all these other stores as well. So you are going to find that one, opening a store is probably going to be more difficult, but also you're going to run into more allegations of IPE and Fitment, which, you know, with what we're going to discuss right now is just exacerbates the issue. Yeah. So let's roll right into the first topic. It was a great hook, by the way, great article written by you. And before we get there, actually, guys, first line in the description is Melvin's contact and his website, just bookmark it. I use Google Keeps. So I have my notes stored online. Just make a little note that says, hey, if I'm ever in trouble, reach out to Melvin. He's accessible. I appreciate you being here, man. The first one I wanted to bring up, though, Timu and Ali express content thieves report Etsy sellers for copyright infringement after stealing from them. Yeah, it's gotten crazy. It's really gotten crazy. So I came across a few Reddit posts a few weeks ago, one month ago, where people were complaining that they had, you know, and this was specifically Etsy sellers, where they had created their own unique designs, you know, they have a small team of maybe two or three people. And they've been selling them their goods for maybe a few months, but their top sellers have been taken down due to copyright infringement. Again, these are the actual creators of the content who are being reported for copyright infringement. So you're probably wondering, you know, how does that happen? Now, what happens is, is because of the data-scaping tools that become so accessible now, you can track what's the best performing content that's being sold or products that's being sold on platforms like Amazon Shopify, sorry, Amazon Shopify, Etsy, and all these other sort of marketplaces. And what will happen is, is they'll copy it, they'll start selling it on AliExpress team and all these other different platforms. And then they will say that, hey, they're the original owners of the content and you, Etsy seller, you're actually the fake, and they'll file a DMC complaint against you now. That's usually the, the most mild version of what's happening. What we've also found is happening is that content thieves are now registering copyrights in content that isn't even theirs. So what they do is they steal from these Etsy sellers and then they go to the United States copyright office and then they register copyright certificates in their own name. Now this is problematic for a number of reasons. The main reason is that once somebody gets a copyright certificate, they are the prima Faki owner of that, of that piece of content in terms of the law and in terms of what the US federal government recognizes or who the US federal government recognizes being the owner. So yeah, I think this is an incentive for people to, one, you know, first of all, stop being more aggressive and monitoring their content and making sure that, you know, they're ahead of filing these complaints before it happens to them. And two guys, you know, I always say, look at your top standards, see what content is most valuable to you and just go to the United States copyright office and have it reached it. You know, it's a quick and easy process. It doesn't cost a lot of money. It's about $60, you know, for a single filing. You know, if you, if you need assistance, you know, with them, we can assist you. We can also guide you as to how to maximize your value with your copyright registrations. But please get it done because this is becoming a bigger problem. And with the holiday season coming up, you know, we just, we're anticipating that it's going to be a lot of lost sales due to this. Yeah, I mean, that's really insightful. And you know, it's funny. I've never really filed a copyright. So that'd be something interesting to like look into for like a future video maybe, but uh, dude, it's, it's crazy out there. Like, I do, I definitely have the tech background, like web developer grew up with the internet. Like, um, I've seen like where people will just make like synthetic identities or whatever to, to, and they don't, there's no penalty of perjury. They don't live in the United States. So they're just like, you check the box that says under penalty of perjury, I attest that this is my original work. They just click the box. They don't care. You know what I mean? And then, and then they file a copyright claim on, you know, Etsy or Amazon, uh, for content that they stole. And it's like, I know anybody hearing this is probably like shocked and appalled. But it's, it's kind of like one of those things where that's just how things are in 2024, man. Like it's not even anything new. I think you've touched on a good point there, you know, one is a lot of the people who aren't committing these, these sort of offenses, they're not, they're not based in the United States. So when you make that, um, when, when you make that statement that you're making, you know, the declaration that this document is being signed under penalty of perjury, who is going to effectively be, be brought to criminal court in the United States, um, for perjury that's taking place on a DMC complaint, probably no one. So they take an advantage of the system. They know that they're outside of the reach, um, of the US government and of the, uh, the service themselves. Uh, it's extremely expensive to actually enforce your, you know, your copyright, let's just leave, especially against people who are foreign participants. So what I would suggest and what my best tip size is again, register your copyright, um, in your top performing content or your top performing products. And then also just start a process of doing reverse Google image searches, maybe once every two weeks, once every three weeks on that content, just to see if anybody is selling it. You know, um, if, if, and I understand this stuff from doing this for a while, monitoring services are expensive and, you know, it may be outside of the scope of a lot of people, um, outside of their budget, they may not be financially viable for them. So unfortunately there is just going to be this, you know, once a month activity or twice a month activity, just go out there, do a Google image search, spend one hour or two on it. Um, and then obviously get back to work and make it a part of your routine, um, and that's pretty much the only solution, um, proactive solutions at least, um, that one can follow at the stage. Yeah. You still have this one viewer and hopefully still watches my, my channel's content. I used to comment on every video, his name was John and he would, he would literally watch everything like a hawk and file takedowns. And he would just tell me like once a week how many takedowns he had to file. And it was just always like, it always made me happy that someone was out there like actually, you know, fighting back. I just kind of adjusted my strategy. I kind of pivoted to like literally just selling products that like don't sell well enough. There I have to worry about them being stolen, which I know sounds so silly, but like if you have enough products up that sell once a year, you can make a substantial amount of money. So I've kind of like shifted to almost like doing something like that, which is crazy, but it works. So yeah, I mean, again, like I said, you know, my client base is pretty much Amazon. It's his shows. And some of them are on the platform for like two years, five years. And they just find that one product that's, that's doing really well now. That's their, their, their sort of one successful product that they've had in that extended period of time. And immediately after that, they start to face these issues with, you know, fake copyright claims or like you said, just widespread copyright infringement. So I think for the average seller that that's, that's a more realistic thing where they've only been able to achieve success with a limited amount of products. And the second that they fail to, you know, enforce the copyright or take the steps to, to project it, then they could lose their base selling content. And again, this is two issues with that. But the other issue is that oftentimes the product that's being sold by the competitor or the conifer is an inferior product. So people who may not know that they're buying a conifer product associate your product or your store with, with the inferior product, and it does not to do damage to your brand. So, you know, which again will also lead to decreased sales. And oftentimes clients, when they start to see that the sales are decreasing and they investigate what is, you know, what's happening, a lot of the time it's too late to sort of, to sort of fix because the problem has gotten so bad. Yeah, great point, man. And it almost reminded me like of something in the past, like when I was selling Amazon FBA and you're kind of in the product research phase interviewing suppliers, the amount of times that I've ran into suppliers that are selling, like if you like, let's say you need something custom, you can pay some, you know, 10 grand or whatever, more for like a custom mold to make some custom piece or custom product like at scale. And then the manufacturers often will then just like go market that product now that you just paid for the mold for they'll market it, even if it's like patented, right? So I'll be doing product research and it's like if you skip checking patents, which honestly Google patents makes it like easy enough that nobody has any excuses, like you can easily commit unknowingly, like commit patent infringement. And that kind of wheels me into the next, you sent me a couple of articles on your blog, I'll link to all them in the description, Amazon sellers guide to temporary restraining orders and store suspensions, like you may get in trouble with Amazon and you legitimately had no clue because, you know, we might have forgotten the check is so do you mind talking a little bit about that? Yeah. So this is a big one and it's actually important when I think, you know, maybe at some stage we need to actually dedicate a whole video to this. So what's happening in the Northern District of Illinois is that there is an effort to be more aggressive in taking down infringing content, all right? So there's a handful of attorney firms about five or six of them. Some of them you might be known to you guys, you know, you may have received DMC notices or letters of demand from them over the years. But what they do is they're able to get a X-potate temporary restraining order against infringing sellers, okay? So what X-potate means is that they do not notify you of the, that they bring in this action against you, okay? So they'll go to the Northern District of Illinois, they usually will go with like 100, 200, 300, sometimes over a thousand defendants in one case, okay? Which is just absurd. You only see it in these cases. And yet they'll have all of these store accounts suspended. So they'll get the restraining order and eventually they'll be, they'll get an asset forfeit order as well, which means that your whatever money that you have on your store account is frozen, you can't access it, because according to the intellectual property holder, you have committed intellectual property infringement. The court recognizes and says, okay, well for a period of 14 days, we're going to suspend the store whilst we investigate what's going on. And yeah, and oftentimes that temporary restraining order becomes a preliminary injunction and your store account can be suspended for two or three months, two or three months whilst you're trying to resolve this issue. So it's becoming a bigger problem and people are using more and more, these law firms are using more and more automated tools. So there's a number of innocent people who are actually being drawn into this litigation because there's very little oversight. They just get, you know, domain names, store names, et cetera, et cetera. Just them as a defendant and then next thing you know, your store account is suspended. So it's definitely something that people need to be aware of, that they can get these orders exported, that means they don't need to notify you. And if they do, then you need to contact those attorneys immediately to try to stop, to try to stop the temporary restraining order from becoming a preliminary injunction or even worse having default judgment being granted against you because you fail to defend the matter. And does this, does this sometimes extend beyond like, I always think of like the centralization and the ability, like that gives them the ability to like kind of enforce things at scale. Like, so is it beyond just like Amazon and et cetera, like does it sometimes go, you said domains? So does that, does that imply like, they might go to like GoDaddy and have like your domain blocked or Shopify and have your store, like is it something like that? Yeah, yes. So they can go as far as, I'm not sure about GoDaddy, but definitely Shopify, Shopify stores get taken out of the time on the same basis. So right now it's mainly focused on eBay, Walmart, Amazon, et cetera, and Shopify. So yeah, so they're able to come in, they're able to suspend your stores. The other thing is, you know, your PayPal accounts, even if you have a US bank account, even if you are living outside of the United States, but you have a US bank account for business purposes, all that can be frozen in seeds whilst you try to resolve this issue. Now one of the reasons why this has been so successful is because getting access to an attorney in the Illinois is quite difficult. And this is a federal court matter. So before you can actually get in the door, you're going to have to pay a deposit of between you know, $5,000 to $7,500 just for that attorney to go and record and start the settlement negotiation process. So you'll see that very few of these matters are actually defended. And yeah, they're effectively getting default judgments against 200 or 300 people. So we'll always say the first thing to do, which you know, go out to the Illinois and try to find somebody who can assist you if it's within your budget. If it's an outside of your budget, you know, we obviously assist with settlement negotiations if there is an issue. And if it becomes it's just obviously through our partner firm in Orlando, we're able to go and record and defend the matter should you so desire. Awesome. That's like I said, man, you got to save Melvin's contact. Hopefully, hopefully you don't need it, right? But in case you do, hopefully you don't. Yeah, we were able to get that the Etsy last at CSU. I had somebody said I committed IP infringement. We got that resolved in like a few days. So that was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's, you know, it's always difficult because at the end of the day, you know, I think as we as we were discussing off camera, a lot of these notices, I'm going to go to somebody who's effectively a call center operative who's probably working on, you know, a form or something like that. Again, I'm just speculating it's an hypothesis about we don't know for sure what happens behind the curtain. But yeah, you know, chances are if somebody has limited knowledge, they're just looking at two images. They see that they're, that they're the same and based on that, they, you know, the content will be taken down. On top of that, I think I mentioned this in our first interview, but Amazon and all these stores can't really get involved in the dispute. You know, legally they can't be seen as bias. So if it's too matching pieces of content, they effectively have to take it down if they receive a notice that's compliant. They're not allowed to adjudicate the dispute because there may be grounds to actually sue them for acting in a way that's a contravention of their requirements in terms of the DMCA. So there's some limitations on what they can and can't do as well. Yeah, plus I'm going to imagine they don't have a financial incentive to get like that involved either. So they're just like, you know, exactly, we'll let you guys resolve it, right? Exactly. Yeah. You had sent a third article, the last one, Amazon takes action against false trademark holders. Now, what is a false trademark that got my attention? All right, yeah, so this is a third article and that's actually not quite serious. And this is, this is, it's also interesting because Amazon themselves don't usually get involved in, in these IP issues. Just, you know, just some background context, you know, Amazon is a marketplace and they try to be as neutral as possible. But it seems like the problem has become so bad that they've actually had to get involved now. In this case, which is actually quite, quite insane, there is a, there was a, and this is again, none of this has been confirmed yet. These are all allegations in a complaint that I've seen from Amazon. Sorry. So it can still be challenged. I haven't seen the, the answer yet, but effectively it involves an attorney who's based in Japan, okay, who started registering thousands of trademark applications for one company, for a Chinese company. And a lot of these trademarks were completely false. So what they would do is they would open an account and I'll express Alibaba. They would say, Hey, this is my, you know, I'm, I'm selling under this trademark. You know, please register it or apply for it. They would take that application and get a, that USPTO application, the trademark application, they would use it to get a, into the brand registry program. And they would use that brand registry program to take down all of these legitimate stuff. I've gotten so many takedowns from, like, I don't get that many, but like, you know, anybody that's been subscribed knows I have hundreds of thousands of products. So it's like I get takedowns. It's not like something that it's not rare. Yeah. So I roll to the bottom of the email, the amount of times I see dot JP, Amazon dot JP. So I wonder if it's that guy, dude. And then there was another funny one. It was like out of Spain and it was some dude who rigged a trademark on Ethereum, basically. Yeah. I mean, who hasn't listed an Ethereum crypto theme product, like product? Get out of here. Come on now. So of course, all of my Ethereum products are gone. Anyway, sorry to cut you off, but no, no, no, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it just speaks to that point of so they were going, they were getting into the brand registry program. And I'm sure for anybody who sells an Amazon, it's, it's just familiar with the brand registry program. But effectively using that amplified sort of protection that they have through the program in order to take down legitimate sellers on the basis that they themselves, you know, were infringing, but they weren't really infringing. And they filed thousands of these notices. So now Amazon themselves actually stepped in and said, you know, they conducted their own investigation. Amazon does have its own counterfeit unit. So this is just something to be aware of for everybody out there is that, you know, they do take these allegations quite seriously. They do actually conduct their own investigations that counterfeit unit does actually work with the federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal departments in order to combat, you know, these types of crimes crammed around IP theft and counterfeiting. And now they've taken this proactive step to actually go after this attorney who I think has been this part is in the process of being the spot who effectively just gave his, his details to this, to this company and allowed them to basically do whatever they wanted. And just on that note, one of the reasons why they had to use an attorney is because in terms from 2019, all foreign sellers or sellers outside of the United States, so people who don't have a US Social Security number, they are required to use a licensed attorney or a US licensed attorney to file a trademark application. So again, with their being the Chinese company, they use this attorney and then they just started filing all these applications. And yeah, again, they started filing all of these peaceful, these false trademark notices. So you mentioned you get quite a few of these as well. Just dude, I mean, they get flagged because now the Amazon's using more automated systems to scan. I'm using this one software. People have heard me talk about it called POD Tomatic that creates 200 products in my account every day automatically using AI, at least like three of them get removed every day. But like, products that I've created, I'm telling you, man, the amount of times I've seen dot JP, because I'll be like, why did this get removed? This makes no sense. Amazon dot JP, like Amazon, Japan, I'm wondering if that's what it was, dude. It might be, it might be, but, but yeah, I think they've started taking action now to remove it. No, they're not the only company that's doing this Saturday. And yeah, there are more and more companies which are doing this. And, you know, the intention, obviously, you know, from us educating your viewers is not to put your office, especially if you're starting up as a seller. This is more for people in the intermediate to sort of expert level of setting. This is to make them aware that, you know, these things are happening. And for some reason, there's this almost a presumption of guilt that people feel when they, when they receive these notices where, you know, just because they've been accused of criminal violation or corporate violation, they feel that they're on the back foot. They've done something wrong and that almost acts as an impediment to them actually defending themselves or acting more aggressively. So, you know, the idea here now is to let you know that you might not have actually done something wrong, you know, either intentionally or unintentionally, you might not have done something wrong at all, but you've just been sucked into either a process that's unlawful or a lawful process that hasn't taken proper account of what's actually gone on, or you might just be a part of a giant scam, you know what I mean. So, so there's a lot happening now in this space and people just need to stop being aware of it if they fall victim to it. And, you know, sadly, I can, I can say that if you're at a certain level, if you're doing this for a few years, you're probably going to find yourself at some stage, sucked into something like something like this. Yep, I can attest to that, but yeah, just, I guess don't be too scared off and then also it helps to have somebody you can reach out to in Melbourne. So, was there anything else that we, I mean, this was extremely insightful, by the way, I do hope that everybody still watching can at least drop a comment and just thank Melbourne for being here because, like, we don't get to hear this side of things or at least hear it from kind of an authoritative figure that can speak to it intelligently, like, I would just be reading your articles if I tried to speak to this stuff, whereas you're actually here in person to, well, in person semi, right, but to speak to it and really give us the, you know, the insights that we want to know. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I'm happy to be here. Again, a lot of this information is based on, you know, research that I've done, but it's also just through the amount of stories that I hear, just through my consultations, to me engaging with existing clients, new clients. So, you know, I'm not detached from what's happening in this space, I'm very much involved in it. You know, my client base is mainly Amazon and Etsy sellers, it has been for, you know, the past six years that we've been doing this. So, you know, we're always happy just to chat as well, drop me an email, you know, I'm happy to just have a conversation with you, just as I've had to stop giving my cell phone number up now, you know, a lot of people kind of take advantage of that. So yeah, if people do contact me and ask for my cell phone number, please let I'm not no longer giving that up, but I am happy to communicate via email or you can call my office phone or anything like that. Cool. Well, yeah, that's all going to be linked up in the description. Save this contact. Melvin, it's been great man having you here. Appreciate it. A lot of interesting articles. They're all going to be linked in the description as well. Anything else we need to know before we go? No, nothing at all. You know, again, you know, the main trust of our business is to assist people with IP issues. We've expanded to some litigation work, especially in the IP space. We want you guys to, you know, be able to contact us if you have any issues, but I also just want to say Ryan, thanks so much. You know, I'm so glad to be here. It's nice to actually just see and speak to you again. And yeah, you know, I'm looking forward to making this more frequent occurrence. For sure, man. For sure. And yeah, keep sending me those articles. They're great. All right. He's Melvin from Just Deck brand protection. Everything's in the description. Thank you so much for being here, Melvin, and we'll see you guys later. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]

In this episode I'm joined by Melvin, who provides legal services to print on demand sellers, to talk about recent hot topics in the POD space 🔥

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