False claims by Rightholders

robasmith

I have been blighted by continuous false claims by Rightholders against my eBay and Amazon accounts. I have now successfully claimed against them for damages. Interestingly, they have now stopped making further false claims against me and here is how I did it.

First of all it is worth noting that when they make a claim they have to make a signed declaration under penalty of perjury. You can search for these forms online which details the declaration that they have to sign. Therefore in order to get your listings removed, they have to sign a legally binding document which can be used in Court against them.

I simply wrote to them following the Civil Procedure Rules and the Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct.

There is a lot of useful guidance on the Citizens Advice Website for taking legal action. They clearly explain how to write a Letter Before Claim to the other side.

There is also a lot of useful useful guidance provided on the government site justice.gov.uk and search for PRACTICE DIRECTION – PRE-ACTION CONDUCT AND PROTOCOLS

I sent the letters recorded delivery and I also emailed it to their email address on their website, so they could not deny they ever received my letters.

Their first response be my letters were always to attempt to deny they had done anything wrong and they would counter claim etc etc in a failed attempt to bully me and scare me from continuing with this process.

My response to this was to simply write to them explaining why I thought they were talking rubbish, that I rejected the content of their response in its entirety and that as they were acting unreasonably (which I understand will go against them in Court) I did not wish to continue to engage in ongoing wasteful communications. I then gave them a further 7 days to confirm that they were going to settle in full and 14 days to make the settlement.

I then received either an offer of a request for further information. They will obviously attempt to drag the process out as much as possible, either by making a ridiculously low offer asking for proof of loss of earnings. Then I either rejected their offer if it was too low or sent proof in terms of copies of sales figures if it was proof they required.  

Eventually I came to an agreement. Although painful in terms of time invested, it was well worth it on a matter of principle, to obtain compensation and to stop them from making further false claims.

Good luck. 

[Deleted User]

what is it regarding? It it along the lines of possible copyright infringement, selling brands that authorised distributors don't want being sold on ebay and amazon, or something completely different? I'm a little confused as I don't understand how you have received compensation when it is you selling the items you mention on these platforms and havn't been through the courts etc. Sounds a strange situation so would be nice to know a little more.

martindow

I'm aware of a rather spurious cease and desist message from the US claiming that a UK site was selling products using a name over which they claimed ownership.  This was a generic name.

The threat there was not legal action but to contact the host of their website.  Anecdotally hosts will take down sites rather than getting involved in legal actions.  In the case I know of, the site owner changed the name they were selling under rather than risk their website's future.

It is a risk that fighting as the OP has done could backfire if it turned into legal action that would be impossibly expensive for an individual to dispute.

[Deleted User]

I don't understand how any compensation was received when this never ended up in court...There is nothing that appears to be done by the books either in terms of how the OP went about their business either so it's all very confusing.