Amazon.com and copyright violations: Is anyone listening?

I'm a big fan of Amazon.com, partly because it's been the source of 95 percent of my income for the past seven years.

But one of my pet peeves about Amazon is that it's so hard to get in touch with anyone there. Like many companies, Amazon answers most e-mail messages with a boilerplate response that doesn't even begin to answer the question. And that's if you get a response at all.

So what happens if you have a really important question? For instance, let's say that pirated copies of your work started showing up on Amazon. And you knew they were knock-offs because you purchased some yourself.

You'd think Amazon would be very interested to know that one of its third-party sellers was doing this, right? So did Joe Mefford of Screenstyle.com, a niche producer of DVDs. Here's his story:

We sell DVDs that we manufacture, and found someone had been making very lousy homemade copies of our DVDs on their computer and reselling them as "straight from the manufacturer." We know because we bought several copies from this reseller.

We contacted Amazon by e-mail -- nothing. We contacted Amazon's legal department by phone (had to leave a voicemail) -- nothing. We contacted Amazon's copyright department by e-mail twice -- nothing. Finally we got a number from someone who said they were Amazon's copyright agent and he said he'd call us back -- nothing. Finally, we had to send a nasty lawyer letter to the reseller, who quit selling our products but remains in business.

Is it always so difficult to get a response from Amazon in matters like these? This person was blatantly using Amazon to sell counterfeit goods and the lack of official response really concerns me .... We sell several hundred thousand dollars a year [on] Amazon, so it hurts their business as well.

I've also e-mailed Amazon with the claim that we should be entitled to any profits this person made selling counterfeit copies of our products, and they've not responded either.

Joe posted his story this week on an Amazon-administered discussion board. No response from Amazon there, either.

Obviously it's a lot easier for a rogue seller to copy DVDs than it is for someone to reproduce a book. But at the same time, the equipment for scanning and reproducing paperbacks is getting cheaper every day. I'm sure there are more than a few counterfeit books being sold among the millions of books currently for sale on Marketplace -- to say nothing about the evolving world of e-books and digital audiobooks.

Amazon has a variety of dedicated e-mail addresses for the public to report infractions of all sorts of Amazon policies. Perhaps it's time Amazon set up another address for reports of intellectual property theft. This issue is in Amazon's best interests, as well as publishers.