Amazon's trademark and brand registry process needs a serious overhaul. While it’s reasonable to allow trademark filing when an application is live with the USPTO (before registration), it's fundamentally flawed to permit the submission of intellectual property violations based on an unregistered trademark. Other platforms, like Shopify, require a fully registered trademark with a valid registration number—not just a serial number—before enabling violation claims.

Amazon’s current approach opens the door to malicious activity. For example, a seller may launch a product and gain traction, only for a competitor to file a trademark on similar keywords with the USPTO and immediately take down the original seller's listings and sell the product themselves. Amazon is not adhering to proper protocol, and this creates serious vulnerabilities that have long affected sellers on the platform. High-level intervention is needed to address these gaps and prevent abuse in the system. A simple solution is to require a registration number to file an IP violation, which only gets issued after USPTO runs their due diligence to ensure the trademark is valid. Someone at Amazon needs to take a deep look at this.