The third annual ‘Brand Protection Day’ event, hosted by Amazon and Andema (Spanish Association for the Defence of Brands), took place earlier this month at Amazon’s MAD12 office in Madrid. It was open to Andema's members, consisting of numerous Spanish brand owners and company executives. Elisa Rodríguez, Director of the OEPM (Spanish Office for Brand and IP Protection), and executives from brands like BMW Group attended the event, emphasising the importance of collaboration across the private and public sector to protect intellectual and industrial property. Members also shared their own experiences of utilising Amazon's brand protection programmes and tools.
The objective of the event was to increase collaboration and dialogue between the Andema’s members and Amazon, in order to protect consumers and brands from intellectual and industrial property infringements. In 2023, Amazon invested more than $1.2 billion (around €1.1 billion) and employed over 15,000 people who are dedicated to protecting customers, brands, selling partners and our store from counterfeit, fraud, or other forms of abuse. Thanks to this strategy, we have made significant progress in preventing counterfeits within our store.
During the event, Andema emphasised the importance of maintaining a fluid and constant relationship between brands and online stores in order to help both parties achieve a common goal: the protection of intellectual property and consumers.
"Events like the one we celebrated today are fundamental not only to exchange experiences and information to protect brands from counterfeiting, but also an occasion to learn about the technological tools available to protect industrial property, as well as the opportunities for joint legal action between brands and retail channels,” said Gerard Guiu, Managing Director of Andema. “During these events, Andema's associates have the opportunity to share first-hand the challenges they face in the online channel, as consumer adoption of this channel increases, there is greater interest from infringers and counterfeiters of products to use them for their illicit purposes."
OEPM Director, Elisa Rodríguez reinforced this message, saying: "The defence of IPs will continue to be one of the fundamental lines of work of the OEPM and collaboration between private and public sectors is essential to address this common goal." She also detailed the OEPM's actions in the fight against IP infringement, including an advertising campaign that will be developed in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Andema and Amazon also presented to Andema members conclusions from Amazon’s fourth Brand Protection Report. The report outlines the actions we take to combat intellectual and industrial property infringements and the advanced tools Amazon offers to rights owners to protect their brands.
We also shared the latest actions taken by Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU), in collaboration with customs services and other law enforcement authorities to prosecute infringers and hold them accountable. Since the CCU’s launch in 2020, it has pursued 21,000 bad actors through litigation and criminal referrals to law enforcement globally.
"At Amazon, we are proud of what we achieved last year, further evolving our technology to anticipate infringers and redoubling our efforts to drive legal action," said Josefina Arias, Brand Protection Strategic Partnerships Manager at Amazon. "We appreciate the growing collaboration of the entire industry in this area and will continue to innovate and work with all relevant stakeholders to achieve zero counterfeits."
In addition, Amazon and BMW Group shared details into winning their first joint lawsuit in Spain to shut down local counterfeiters. Hannes Bucher, from BMW's legal department for Intellectual Property Law, Trademarks, and Designs, said: "When companies like Amazon and the BMW Group join forces, contributing resources and expertise to jointly identify and attack counterfeiters, we are much more effective in this fight. We are proud of what we have achieved together to protect customers from these counterfeiters, and that motivates us to continue working closely to achieve a lasting impact."
