The Trump organization has taken controversial legal action against online vendors who are allegedly selling counterfeit products.

Submitted by a conglomerate owned by Donald Trump Litigation On Friday, to an unnamed goods seller in the US District Court in Florida, WalmartAmazon and eBay have sold “inferior imitations” of cups, baby clothes, t-shirts and other items with Trump trademarks.

“The defendant improperly promotes, markets and/or sells unauthorized, illegal products that infringe at least some of the plaintiff’s Trump trademarks,” the complaint said. “By selling counterfeit products that use Trump’s trademarks to claim to be authentic and certified products, the defendant will cause confusion and deception in the market.”

Sales of Trump products have proven to be advantageous for some, with around 9,000 Amazon sellers raising nearly $140 million in revenue in the months leading up to the election. data From the e-commerce marketing platform Omnisend.

Disputes in Legal Strategy

The Trump organization’s decision to sue these sellers in a specific way has raised questions from legal experts. Conglomerate chose a Schedule the caseLegal trends that have snowballed popularity among several trademark lawyers in recent decades, as plaintiffs often get skirt fees and can generally produce a mass of change from settlements.

As an e-commerce giant Beef in third party marketslegal concerns about Dupet’s sales have also increased as well, and plaintiffs may want to throw a wide net to hold liable infringers. Unlike many trademark infringement cases, Schedule A cases allow plaintiffs to sue a wide range of defendants without naming certain entities that they are foreign vendors, such as the names of specific online sellers. This blanket allows plaintiffs to avoid paying expensive application fees for each entity that is in litigation.

Scheduling a case also gives great power to the judge’s discretion. Boilerplate complaints often outline allegations against counterfeiters who committed the highest level of trademark infringement. Sarah FuckrellProfessor of Intellectual Property Law at the Chicago Kent College of Law. Part of this strategy is rhetorical. To assert the judge that these anonymous “bad actors” should be accountable, she said luck.

At that point, the judge can decide to freeze the accounts of the online provider of counterfeit products. Often, these sellers choose to settle with the plaintiff, rather than hiring an attorney to combat the case.

“As you can imagine, when the court admits this, you’ll wake up one day, your Amazon account will be frozen and you don’t know what’s going on,” Fackrell said. luck. “It creates an incredible incentive to calm down or resolve just the default, depending on the amount you have and your business model.”

According to Fackrell, up to 1,000 sellers can sue in these cases.

“This is the game,” she said. “This is really extraordinary. This isn’t usually how federal lawsuits go.”

Due Process Concerns

What concerns some legal experts are that many sellers have been informed by email that their accounts have been frozen. Some of these sellers could be sophisticated counterfeiters, but others likely not, Fackrell said. However, for the defendant’s blanket agency created through Schedule A, the legal system does not always adequately distinguish between these parties, punishing small vendors in the same way as those carrying out large-scale operations.

“There are many reasons to worry about legitimate procedures. These defendants are like riding on the train, whether they have done something wrong or not,” Fuckrell said.

2023, The court ordered a Florida woman to pay $250,000 As part of a crackdown on fraudulent products after she sold a portrait of country musician Luke Combs and a tumbler worth $360 on Amazon. The woman told the media that she found legal notices in the Junk Folder, but because she was in the hospital, she missed the deadline for her response and was ordered to pay statutory damages.

Other sellers included in the lawsuit looked like bigger businesses from Asia. comb I apologized After learning about the lawsuit and offering to help women pay their medical expenses.

Why is the Trump organization suing now?

While it is difficult to identify how much money a plaintiff can make from Schedule A, Fackrell said that some lawyers admit it is a strategy to bring in cash.

“At least some of these plaintiffs are being sold in this form of lawsuit as alternative revenue streams,” she said.

The specific reasons behind the Trump organization’s filing trademark infringement lawsuits are not clear, Amy LandersProfessor of Intellectual Property Law at Thomas R. Klein School of Law at Drexel University; luck. Some brands feel that they are not forced to pursue copyright infringement lawsuits against alleged fraudulent product sellers as products can work effectively as free advertisements.

Brands like Chanel And Louis Vuitton may be the other way around. More lawsuitsLuxury companies are designed because they want their brands to be general and meaningless. But for the Trump organization, fraudulent products have been manufactured for over a decade, raising questions about why conglomerates are now choosing to take legal action against these alleged infringers.

“If someone else is selling a product and they don’t allow it, it may seem general in the end,” Landers said. “But this is very intuitive to me because… there has never been any actual enforcement before.

Trump organization did not respond luckRequest a comment.