Customs, Tariffs and Cross-Border Trade

IEEPA Tariff Refunds for Amazon Sellers: Who Actually Gets the Money

The Supreme Court voided the tariffs. Customs is refunding roughly $166 billion. But the refund goes to the importer of record — and most marketplace sellers are not the importer of record.

By Kenneth G. Eade, Esq., Founding Attorney, AMZ Sellers Attorney®  |  Published August 23, 2026  |  Approximately 12 minute read

What the Supreme Court actually decided

In February 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, decided together with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, the Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The ruling invalidated the IEEPA-based duties that had been collected on imports beginning in early 2025 — the reciprocal tariffs, the fentanyl-related surcharges applied to goods of Canadian, Mexican and Chinese origin, and the various country-specific actions that followed. Within days the administration terminated the underlying orders and Customs stopped collecting IEEPA duties on entries made on or after February 24, 2026.

The scale is the part that matters to sellers. By the government's own accounting to the Court of International Trade, roughly 330,000 importers paid or deposited an estimated $166 billion in IEEPA duties across more than 53 million entries. That is not an abstraction. It is a very large number of $300 and $900 and $4,000 charges sitting inside the landed cost of ordinary FBA inventory.

What the decision did not touch is equally important. Section 232 duties on steel, aluminum and other covered categories, Section 301 duties on goods of Chinese origin, and antidumping and countervailing duties all rest on separate statutory authority. They remain in force and they are not refundable through this process. Any credible refund analysis begins by separating IEEPA duties from everything else on the entry.

How Customs is paying the money back

Refunds are not automatic. Customs built a new module inside the ACE Secure Data Portal called CAPE, for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries. A claimant uploads a CSV file listing entry numbers — up to 9,999 per declaration, with multiple declarations permitted — and Customs validates the file, confirms the submitter's authority, recalculates duties, and consolidates approved refunds into a single electronic payment with statutory interest. Ordinary post summary corrections cannot be used for this purpose. CAPE is the channel.

The rollout has been phased, and the phases are not cosmetic. They determine whether recovery is administrative or judicial.

The problem nobody is writing about: you are probably not the importer of record

Every guide published on this subject so far has been written by a customs broker, a freight forwarder, or an accounting firm, and every one of them is addressed to the importer of record. That is a reasonable audience for those authors. It is the wrong audience for an Amazon seller.

Customs pays the importer of record named on the entry, or a party that importer has designated on CBP Form 4811. Consider how a typical FBA supply chain is actually structured:

• A Chinese manufacturer quotes delivered duty paid pricing. The manufacturer, its affiliate, or a nominated agent clears the goods. The seller sees one number on a proforma invoice and never touches a 7501.
• A freight forwarder or consolidator offers an all-in door-to-Amazon rate and clears in its own name under its own bond, invoicing the seller for duties as a pass-through line item.
• A 3PL or prep center handles inbound clearance for a group of clients and allocates duty charges across accounts.
• The seller imports in its own name, with its own bond and its own ACE account. This is the minority case among small and mid-sized sellers.

In the first three scenarios, the refund is legally the importer of record's to collect. The seller paid the duty economically but has no standing with Customs on that entry. And because approved refunds carry statutory interest running from the original entry date, the amount now sitting with that third party exceeds what the seller originally paid.

What a seller can actually do about it

Where a third party holds the refund, this stops being a customs question and becomes a commercial dispute. The theories available depend heavily on the paper, but the recurring ones are these.

Breach of contract and the duty line item

Where the seller was invoiced a specific duty or tariff surcharge as a pass-through charge, the agreement often characterizes that amount as a reimbursement of a cost incurred on the seller's behalf rather than as part of the service price. If the cost has now been refunded, the reimbursement obligation is arguably extinguished and retention of the refund is a breach. The strength of this argument tracks directly to how the charge was described on the invoice and in the rate agreement. Sellers whose forwarder simply quoted a single all-in number are in a materially weaker position than sellers whose invoices itemized duties separately.

Agency and the broker's obligations to its principal

A licensed customs broker acting for a client operates as an agent, with the accounting and disclosure duties that role carries. Where a broker or forwarder filed entries as agent, collected duty funds from the client, and has now recovered those funds from the government, the argument that the recovery belongs to the principal is a strong one. Where the forwarder acted as principal under its own bond and sold the seller a landed-cost product, the argument is harder and the answer turns on the contract.

Unjust enrichment and money had and received

Where no contract term squarely governs, restitution theories fill the gap. The elements are unusually clean here: the seller conferred a benefit, the third party retained it, and retention without payment is inequitable because the underlying obligation was void from the start. These claims are useful precisely because they do not depend on a well-drafted agreement, which most sellers do not have.

Read the forum and limitation clauses before you write the demand letter

This is where sellers lose otherwise good claims. Forwarder terms and conditions, NVOCC bills of lading, and 3PL service agreements routinely contain a foreign or inconvenient choice of forum, an arbitration clause, and — most dangerously — a contractual suit limitation far shorter than any statute of limitations, commonly nine months or one year from delivery. A seller who spends eighteen months politely asking a forwarder for an update may discover the claim was time-barred long before the refund was even processed. The paper controls, and it should be read before the first email is sent.

Where the supplier is the party holding the refund, add the practical problem that the counterparty is often offshore, judgment-proof in any realistic sense, and still supplying the seller's inventory. That combination usually points toward negotiated credit against future purchase orders rather than litigation, and the leverage for that negotiation is best created early, while the commercial relationship still has value to both sides.

If you were the importer of record, your problem is the calendar

Sellers who imported in their own name face a different and more urgent risk: entries liquidating out from under them.

Under 19 U.S.C. § 1514, a protest against a Customs decision must generally be filed within 180 days of liquidation. Unliquidated entries and recently liquidated entries fall inside the straightforward CAPE path. Finally liquidated entries do not. In July 2026 the Court of International Trade entered an order directing refunds on a plaintiff's finally liquidated entries and signaled that substantially similar relief would follow in the several thousand cases pending before it. Importers who never filed their own action have no equivalent confirmed administrative route for that category, and the government has appealed the scope of that relief to the Federal Circuit.

Reduced to its practical terms: entries are quietly liquidating every week, and each one that liquidates and ages past the protest window moves from the easy category to the category that may require a lawsuit — or may not be recoverable at all, depending on how the appeal resolves. Treating this as an open-ended administrative process is the single most expensive mistake available.

The second wave: what you told your customers

Many sellers responded to the tariffs by raising prices, and some did so transparently, itemizing a tariff surcharge at checkout or on wholesale invoices. Those sellers now sit on both sides of the transaction. They may be creditors of their forwarder or supplier, and they may be defendants to downstream purchasers arguing that a surcharge collected to fund a duty that has now been refunded should be returned. Claims of exactly this shape have already been filed against importers, and there is no reason to expect marketplace sellers to be exempt.

The exposure is largest where the surcharge was expressly labeled as a tariff recovery rather than folded into the price. Sellers in that position should be preserving records now showing what was collected, what was remitted, and to whom, before characterizing any recovered refund in their books.

One warning about the filing itself

A CAPE declaration is a representation to the federal government. Where the underlying entries contain valuation problems, misdescribed goods, incorrect country-of-origin declarations, or transshipment through an intermediary at a reduced declared value, filing a refund claim on those entries invites Customs to examine them closely. Penalties under 19 U.S.C. § 1592 are available for fraud, gross negligence and negligence in connection with entry, and false statements to a federal agency carry independent criminal exposure.

A refund claim is a bad reason to volunteer a customs file that will not withstand review. Where the entries are clean, file promptly. Where they are not, the analysis should happen before anything is submitted, and it should happen under privilege.

What to do this week

1. Pull your entry documents. Request CBP Form 7501 for every inbound shipment from February 2025 through February 2026 from whoever cleared them. A forwarder that resists producing entry summaries for shipments it handled on your behalf has told you something useful.
2. Read block 1 on each one. Sort your entries into two piles: those where you are the importer of record, and those where you are not. The two piles get completely different treatment.
3. Isolate the IEEPA duties. Look for Chapter 99 classifications in the 9903.01 and 9903.02 ranges. Do not build a claim that sweeps in Section 301 or Section 232 amounts.
4. Calendar liquidation on every entry you own. Then work backward from the 180-day protest window. Do this before anything else if you imported in your own name.
5. Locate the contract governing your forwarder or supplier relationship, including the terms on the back of the bill of lading and anything incorporated by reference on a website. Find the limitation period and the forum clause before you send a demand.
6. Preserve your customer-facing pricing records if you ever itemized a tariff surcharge.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who receives the IEEPA tariff refund if my supplier was the importer of record?

Customs issues the refund to the importer of record listed on the customs entry, or to a party that importer designated on CBP Form 4811. If a supplier shipping on delivered duty paid terms, a freight forwarder, a consolidator, or a 3PL was named, the refund and its statutory interest go to that party. The seller who bore the duty as a line item on an invoice has no direct claim against Customs for that entry. Recovery becomes a contract matter against the party holding the money.

Can an Amazon seller file a CAPE claim directly?

Only if the seller was the importer of record on the entry, or is a licensed customs broker properly authorized by that importer of record. A CAPE declaration is submitted through the ACE Secure Data Portal as a CSV file of entry numbers. Sellers who imported in their own name with their own customs bond can generally file. Sellers who relied on a supplier's delivered duty paid arrangement generally cannot.

How do I tell whether I actually paid IEEPA duties?

Review CBP Form 7501 entry summaries for shipments arriving between February 2025 and late February 2026 and look for Chapter 99 tariff classifications in the 9903.01 and 9903.02 ranges. Importers with ACE portal access can export the Entry Summary Detail Report and filter on those classifications. If your only documentation is a supplier or forwarder invoice showing a tariff surcharge, that is evidence of what you paid but not evidence of what Customs collected from you.

What is the deadline to claim an IEEPA tariff refund?

There is no single calendar deadline for the refund program, but each entry carries its own clock. A protest under 19 U.S.C. § 1514 must generally be filed within 180 days after liquidation. Entries that liquidate and pass that window without a protest move into the hardest recovery category. Waiting converts an administrative claim into a litigation claim, and eventually into no claim at all.

Are Section 301 or Section 232 tariffs refundable as well?

No. The February 2026 Supreme Court decision addressed tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Section 232 duties on steel, aluminum and other covered products, Section 301 duties on goods of Chinese origin, and antidumping and countervailing duties rest on separate statutory authority and are unaffected. Any refund analysis has to separate IEEPA duties from those other duties before a claim is filed.

Do I need to file a lawsuit at the Court of International Trade?

It depends on the liquidation status of the entries. In July 2026 the Court of International Trade entered an order directing refunds on a plaintiff's finally liquidated entries and indicated similar relief in the several thousand cases pending before it. Importers who never filed suit have no equivalent confirmed administrative route for that category, and the government has appealed the scope of that relief to the Federal Circuit. Where a meaningful share of duties sits in finally liquidated entries, a protective filing should be evaluated promptly rather than deferred.

What if I passed the tariff cost through to my customers?

That creates exposure on the other side of the ledger. Sellers who itemized a tariff surcharge at checkout or in wholesale invoices may face claims from downstream purchasers seeking recovery of amounts that have now been refunded or are refundable. Litigation of this kind has already begun against importers. Preserve records showing what was collected, what was remitted, and to whom, before deciding how to characterize a recovered refund.

Does the refund include interest?

Yes. Approved refunds are issued with statutory interest running from the original entry, consolidated by importer of record and paid electronically. Because interest accrues to the party Customs pays, the amount at stake in an importer-of-record dispute is larger than the duty figure alone, and grows the longer the underlying claim goes unresolved.

Related reading

• The BSA amendment that reaches your lender, your buyer, and your frozen funds
• Amazon arbitration: recovering frozen funds and withheld disbursements
• Amazon seller legal services: suspensions, IP defense, TRO defense and arbitration

IP Litigation

When Does a Marketplace IP Dispute Become a Federal Lawsuit?

Most disputes never leave the platform. The ones that do follow a recognizable path — and the seller who recognizes it early gets to choose the forum instead of receiving it.

By Kenneth G. Eade, CA Bar No. 93774, with Michael S. Brandt, USPTO Reg. No. 39119 · August 2, 2026

Sellers tend to experience IP disputes as isolated events. A complaint arrives, a listing comes down, they respond, it resolves or it doesn't. Each one feels like its own small crisis.

Viewed from the outside, most of these disputes are moving along a path with five stages. Knowing where you are on it — and which way things are heading — is most of the strategy.

Stage one: the platform complaint

A rights holder files. The listing comes down. The seller responds through the marketplace's process.

The overwhelming majority of disputes begin and end here, and that's appropriate — it's fast and cheap. But understand what this stage is: the platform is not adjudicating rights. It is managing risk. A marketplace deciding a complaint is not deciding who owns anything, and a favorable outcome here doesn't resolve the underlying legal question at all.

Related reading on the specific complaint types: copyright complaints on product photos and APEX patent notices.

Stage two: the retraction demand

Where a complaint is baseless, the efficient move is often to go directly to the complainant rather than continuing to argue with the platform. A well-supported retraction demand sets out why the complaint fails and what exposure the complainant carries if they persist.

This resolves more matters than sellers expect, particularly where the complaint was filed reflexively by a brand protection vendor who never examined the facts.

It also produces valuable information. A complainant who ignores a well-supported retraction demand is telling you they intend to keep going — and that's the first real signal that the matter may not stay on the platform.

Stage three: the USPTO proceeding

Where the dispute is really about whether a registration or patent should exist, the fight moves to the Office: cancellation, opposition, expungement, or patent reexamination.

These proceedings do something valuable and something limited, and sellers regularly misjudge which is which.

Stage four: federal court, by your choice

This is the stage most sellers don't know exists, and it's where the initiative shifts.

A declaratory judgment action asks a federal court to declare that you don't infringe, or that the asserted right is invalid or unenforceable — before the rights holder sues you. It converts you from a defendant waiting to be sued into a plaintiff choosing the timing and often the venue.

It requires an actual controversy, which generally means the rights holder has done enough to create a real and immediate dispute. Repeated platform complaints, cease and desist letters, and public accusations often supply that.

When does it make sense? Classically: a rights holder is repeatedly disrupting your business through platform complaints without ever filing suit. They get the benefit of the accusation with none of the cost or risk. You can't operate and you can't resolve it. A declaratory judgment action forces the question into a forum where they have to prove something.

Affirmative claims can run alongside. Where a competitor knowingly files baseless complaints, possible theories include tortious interference, unfair competition, and in the copyright context a misrepresentation claim under Section 512(f). None is a simple filing — each needs proof of knowledge or intent, quantified damages, and the resources to litigate. But they exist, and a complainant who assumes there's no downside to abusive filing is sometimes wrong.

Stage five: federal court, not by your choice

The other way sellers arrive in federal court is a Schedule A case: a lawsuit naming dozens or hundreds of online sellers as defendants identified in a sealed schedule, frequently in the Northern District of Illinois or a comparable venue.

The plaintiff typically obtains an ex parte temporary restraining order freezing marketplace accounts and payment processor balances before any defendant has been served or heard.

Three things sellers need to know about this and usually learn too late. The deadlines move fast. The frozen funds are not released by appealing to the platform — the freeze exists because of a court order, and the platform is complying with it. And responding requires appearing in the federal case, which is a different undertaking from anything on the marketplace side.

Notably, sellers often reach stage five without passing through stages one through four at all. The first notice is a frozen account.

The signals that a dispute is about to escalate

Watch for these. Each is a meaningful shift, not a routine event:

• A well-supported retraction demand is ignored. They intend to continue.
• Complaints repeat across multiple listings or accounts. That's a campaign, not an objection.
• Correspondence arrives from litigation counsel rather than a brand protection agency. Different budget, different intent.
• A cease and desist demands an accounting of past sales. They're building a damages theory.
• An account or balance freezes with no preceding platform complaint. A court order likely already exists and service hasn't reached you.

Matching the forum to the remedy

The single most useful discipline here is asking what you actually need, and then checking whether the forum you're in can provide it.

Need a listing restored? Platform process, or a retraction demand.

Need a registration removed? USPTO — cancellation, opposition, expungement, reexamination.

Need someone ordered to stop? Federal court. Nothing else can issue an injunction.

Need to be paid for losses? Federal court. Neither the platform nor the TTAB awards damages.

Need frozen funds released after a TRO? Federal court, in the case that issued the order.

Sellers lose time and money by pursuing the right claim in the wrong forum — most commonly by seeking through platform appeals a remedy no platform has the power to grant.

Frequently asked

General information only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by this post. Whether any claim or proceeding is available depends on the specific facts, the applicable law, and the forum. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Attorney advertising. Related: TRO defense · IP complaint defense · disputes overview

Trademark

Someone Opposed My Trademark Application. Now What?

It isn't a rejection, it isn't the end of the application, and it probably won't go to trial. But there is a deadline, and missing it costs you everything.

By Kenneth G. Eade, CA Bar No. 93774 · August 2, 2026

Your application sailed through examination. It published. You were counting the weeks to registration. Then a notice of opposition arrives, referencing a company you've possibly never heard of, and the language reads like a lawsuit.

Two things to understand immediately, and they pull in opposite directions.

Your application was not rejected

The USPTO examining attorney approved it. That's why it published in the first place — publication for opposition is the step that follows successful examination.

An opposition is a third party stepping in to object before registration issues. Your application cleared examination on the merits, and the opposer now carries the burden of establishing grounds to prevent registration. That's a materially better starting position than a refusal from the Office.

But there is a deadline, and default is fatal

The Board's institution order sets your answer deadline. Extensions are commonly available on request — but they have to be requested.

If you do nothing, default judgment is entered and the application is refused. This is the single most common way applicants lose oppositions, and it is entirely avoidable. Applicants assume a proceeding will lapse if unattended, or that they can sort it out once things calm down, and lose applications they had a real chance of defending.

Read the opposer's actual complaint, not their pleading style

Notices of opposition are drafted broadly. They tend to plead every available ground and describe your application as if it threatens the opposer's entire business. That's advocacy, not information.

The useful question is narrower: what does this party actually sell, and where does it genuinely overlap with what I sell?

Very often the answer is: barely. The opposer sells in an adjacent category, saw your application in a watch service, and filed defensively. Their real concern is that you'll expand into their space — not that your current products compete with theirs.

That gap between what's pleaded and what's actually at stake is where most oppositions get resolved.

Most oppositions settle, and here's the mechanism

The tool nobody mentions to sellers is the coexistence or consent agreement: a negotiated arrangement where both parties use their marks under defined limitations. Narrowing the goods each will offer. Restricting channels of trade. Agreeing on how the marks are presented.

Frequently the practical fix is even simpler — amending your identification of goods to exclude the overlap. If you applied broadly across a class but actually sell in one narrow slice of it, narrowing the identification to what you genuinely sell can eliminate the opposer's concern entirely.

You give up coverage you weren't using. They withdraw. Your application proceeds. Everyone spends a fraction of what a contested proceeding costs.

This is worth exploring early, because the cost curve in TTAB proceedings is steep. A matter that resolves before discovery costs a small share of one that runs through testimony periods and briefing.

When it's worth fighting

Sometimes settlement isn't available or isn't acceptable. Fighting makes sense where the opposer's mark is genuinely weak, where their claimed priority doesn't hold up, where the marks and goods are actually far enough apart that confusion is unlikely, or where the coverage they're asking you to give up is coverage you actually need.

A contested opposition runs like federal civil litigation conducted almost entirely on paper: pleadings, discovery including document requests and depositions, evidence submitted during assigned testimony periods, briefing, and occasionally oral argument. The Board can refuse registration but cannot award damages or issue an injunction.

Can you keep selling meanwhile?

An opposition concerns whether your application proceeds to registration. It is not an injunction and doesn't by itself prohibit use.

The caveat matters though. If the opposer holds prior rights that your use actually infringes, they have remedies in federal court that are entirely separate from the opposition. And aggressively expanding into contested territory while a proceeding is pending complicates both your settlement posture and any later litigation. Whether continued use is prudent depends on how strong their rights really are.

First moves

Calendar the answer deadline. Everything else is secondary.

Pull the opposer's mark and their actual commercial footprint. Registration record, specimens, what they really sell, where they really sell it.

Compare their goods against yours honestly. Not against your ambitions — against what you sell today.

Assess whether narrowing your identification would resolve it. If yes, that conversation should happen early, while it's still cheap.

Don't contact the opposer directly before you've done the above. An unconsidered communication in a contested proceeding is evidence.

Frequently asked

General information only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by this post. Deadlines, available grounds, and procedure depend on the Board's order in your proceeding and on rules that change. Attorney advertising. Related: TTAB attorneys · cancellation · trademark registration

Brand Protection

Brand Registry Rejected You. Here Are the Seven Usual Reasons.

The rejection message rarely tells you what actually failed. Some of these you can fix this afternoon. One of them means someone else has your brand.

By Kenneth G. Eade, CA Bar No. 93774 · August 2, 2026

Brand Registry rejections are frustrating in a specific way: the message tells you that you failed without telling you what failed. So sellers resubmit the same application, get the same rejection, and conclude the system is arbitrary.

It usually isn't. In our experience nearly every rejection traces to one of seven causes, and the diagnosis is done by comparing your application against the trademark record field by field.

1. The brand name doesn't literally match the mark

The most common cause and the easiest to miss, because the comparison is literal. The name you enter has to correspond to the mark exactly as it appears on the trademark record.

What breaks it: an added or omitted space. A hyphen. Punctuation. A suffix like Inc or LLC that's on one and not the other. A stylization difference. A design element in the registration that isn't in your entered text.

Sellers enter the brand as they market it rather than as it was registered. Pull up the trademark record and copy the mark exactly as it reads there — character for character.

2. The trademark owner isn't the Seller Central account holder

The mark is registered to you personally and the account is an LLC. Or it's registered to a holding company and the account is the operating entity. Or it was registered before a name change that was never recorded with the USPTO.

Amazon is checking whether the party enrolling is the party that owns the mark. Where the two genuinely are the same business under different names, the fix is usually recording the correct ownership with the USPTO — an assignment or a change of name — rather than arguing the point with Amazon.

3. The images don't show the mark on the product

Amazon generally wants to see the brand permanently affixed to the product or its packaging, photographed on the physical goods.

What tends to fail: digital mockups, images with the logo overlaid in editing software, temporary labels, hangtags applied for the photo, and renders.

The purpose is demonstrating a genuine branded product rather than a name applied to generic goods. Worth noting the symmetry here — the same evidentiary weakness that defeats an enrollment is what can later support a challenge to a registration obtained on a fabricated specimen.

4. The trademark is pending, not registered

The standard registration-based path contemplates an issued registration, although Brand Registry accepts application serial numbers.

5. The registration is in the wrong class

Trademark registrations cover specified classes of goods and services. A registration covering apparel doesn't cover the kitchen products you're actually selling.

This happens when a seller registers early for one product line and later expands, or when the application was drafted without much attention to what the business would eventually sell. The fix is usually a new application in the correct class, which means time — one reason it's worth having someone who knows the catalog draft the identification of goods in the first place.

6. The verification code went to your attorney

Amazon's verification commonly routes a code to the correspondent of record on the trademark file — which is frequently the attorney or filing agent who handled the application, not the seller.

Sellers wait for an email that was never coming to them, assume the application stalled, and start over. Worse, sellers who used a cheap online filing service sometimes find that the correspondent is a company that no longer responds, at which point updating the correspondence address on the trademark record becomes the actual task.

Check who the correspondent of record is before assuming the code was lost.

7. Someone else already enrolled your brand

This is the one that isn't an enrollment defect, and no amount of resubmitting will touch it.

If another party holds a registration for your brand name and has enrolled it, the enrollment is the symptom and the registration is the cause. Fixing it means addressing the registration itself — opposition, cancellation, expungement, or reexamination depending on facts and timing.

Sellers in this position frequently also start receiving IP complaints filed by the enrolled party against their own listings, which runs on a much shorter clock than any USPTO proceeding and has to be managed in parallel. We wrote about that scenario in detail in Someone Trademarked My Brand.

How to diagnose which one you have

Open the trademark record and your enrollment application side by side. Compare, in this order: the mark as written, the owner of record against your Seller Central entity, the classes against your actual products, the registration status, and the correspondent of record.

Then look at your images with a stranger's eye and ask whether they show a real branded product or a logo placed on a photograph.

If everything lines up and it still fails, search the register for your brand name owned by someone else. That's cause seven, and it's a different conversation.

Frequently asked

General information only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by this post. Amazon Brand Registry enrollment criteria are set by Amazon and change — confirm current requirements directly. Attorney advertising. Related: trademark registration · IP Accelerator alternative · hijacker removal

Copyright

Someone Filed a Copyright Complaint on My Product Photos. Do I Even Own Them?

Uncomfortable question, and for most sellers the answer is no. Here is why paying for photography usually doesn't transfer the copyright — and why that matters enormously before you file a counter-notice.

By Kenneth G. Eade, CA Bar No. 93774 · August 2, 2026

A copyright complaint lands on your listing. Your first instinct is that this is obviously wrong — you paid for those photos, you have the invoice, they're yours.

Before you act on that instinct, sit with a harder question: did you ever actually acquire the copyright?

Paying for a photo doesn't buy the copyright

Under US copyright law, the person who creates a work generally owns the copyright in it. Payment doesn't transfer that by itself. What you bought, absent something more, was a photograph — not the exclusive rights in it.

There are two routes by which a commissioning party ends up owning the work, and freelance product photography usually fits neither.

Work made for hire covers employees creating works within the scope of employment. Your in-house marketing person, yes. A contractor you found on a freelance platform, no.

Work made for hire also covers certain specifically enumerated categories of commissioned works — and only where the parties sign a written agreement expressly designating the work as made for hire. The statutory list is narrow and does not comfortably accommodate ordinary product photography.

Which leaves written assignment. A transfer of copyright ownership generally has to be in writing and signed by the owner. Not implied from an invoice. Not inferred from the fact that you paid. Not established by a Slack message saying "all yours."

The supplier images problem

The other common origin story: the images came with the product data from a manufacturer or wholesaler. Everybody in the category uses them. Nobody ever discussed rights.

That works fine right up until the commercial relationship changes. A supplier who decides to sell direct, or who signs an exclusive with a different distributor, suddenly has both a reason and the standing to file. What felt like an informal industry norm turns out to have been an undocumented permission that nobody wrote down and nobody agreed would survive.

The questions that matter: was there permission at all, what was its scope, and does it survive the end of the relationship? If none of that was documented, the seller is arguing about an implied license — a much weaker position than owning the images outright.

Why this matters before you counter-notice

A counter-notice looks like a form. It isn't.

It is a statement made under penalty of perjury that the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification. And it typically requires you to consent to the jurisdiction of a federal district court and to accept service of process from the complaining party.

Read that again in plain terms. You are telling the complainant where to sue you, and confirming you'll take the papers.

Where you genuinely hold the rights and the complaint is baseless, that is exactly the right move and the jurisdictional consent is a price worth paying. Where you have simply assumed you own images you never received an assignment for, you have made a sworn statement on a premise you never checked and invited a lawsuit from someone who may actually hold the copyright.

Section 512(f) cuts both ways

The Copyright Act provides a remedy against a party who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing. It can also reach a knowing material misrepresentation in a counter-notice.

Two practical takeaways. Courts have generally read "knowingly" demandingly, so this is not a routine remedy against every mistaken complaint — sellers hoping to punish a competitor for a sloppy filing usually overestimate it. But it is a real provision, and it is worth preserving evidence where a competitor appears to be filing complaints they know to be groundless. It also cuts the other way: your own counter-notice is a place where a knowing misstatement carries consequences.

What to do when the complaint arrives

Identify exactly which images are accused. Complaints often sweep in an entire listing when only one image is at issue.

Trace the origin of each one. Who took it, when, under what arrangement, and is there anything signed? This is the step sellers skip, and it determines everything downstream.

Find out who the complainant is. A photographer asserting their own work, a supplier, a competitor, or a stock agency are four very different problems with four different resolutions.

Don't file a counter-notice on an assumption. Verify ownership first. If you can't, that answer is itself useful.

Sometimes the right answer is to reshoot

We'd rather say this plainly than sell a fight that doesn't make sense. Where you can't establish clean ownership, commissioning new photographs under a proper written assignment resolves the listing problem, eliminates the recurrence risk permanently, and usually costs less than a dispute.

Fighting makes sense where you do hold the rights, where the complaint is part of a pattern of competitive abuse, or where accepting the strike carries account health consequences that outweigh the cost of contesting it.

And whichever way this one goes: get written assignments for every image going forward. One paragraph in the engagement, signed before the shoot. It is the cheapest legal document in e-commerce and almost nobody has it.

Frequently asked

General information only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by this post. Copyright ownership, the availability of any defense, and the consequences of a counter-notice depend on the specific facts and documents. Attorney advertising. Related: copyright services · IP complaint defense · sabotage survival guide

Patent

Can You Kill a Bad Patent? Reexamination, IPR, and Why Winning APEX Isn't Enough

If the same weak patent keeps coming back at you, defending each complaint is treating symptoms. Here is what it takes to go after the patent itself — and when that math actually works.

By Kenneth G. Eade, CA Bar No. 93774, with Michael S. Brandt, USPTO Reg. No. 39119 · August 2, 2026

A pattern we see: a seller wins an APEX evaluation, feels relief, and four months later gets hit by the same patent owner on a different ASIN. Then again. Then a competitor in the same category calls with the same problem and the same patent number.

At that point the seller is no longer solving a listing problem. They are paying rent to a patent that may not have deserved to issue.

Infringement and validity are separate fights

This distinction governs everything else, and sellers collapse it constantly.

Infringement asks whether your product falls within the claims. That is the APEX question, and it is the question in most listing disputes.

Validity asks whether the patent should have issued at all — whether the claimed invention was already known or obvious in light of what came before.

Winning on infringement leaves the patent standing and available for the next assertion. Winning on validity removes it. That is why the two paths have such different costs and timelines: one resolves a dispute, the other removes a weapon.

Route one: ex parte reexamination

Anyone can ask the USPTO to reconsider an issued patent based on prior art — patents and printed publications — that raises a substantial new question of patentability. The Office decides whether that threshold is met and, if so, reexamines the claims.

The defining feature is in the name. It is ex parte: once instituted, the proceeding runs largely between the Office and the patent owner, and the requester steps back. That has two consequences sellers should weigh in opposite directions.

Cheaper and lower-profile. No discovery, no hearing, no sustained litigation posture. And in appropriate circumstances the requester need not be publicly identified — meaningful when you don't want to hand a patent owner your name and an infringement theory.

You lose control. You cannot respond when the patent owner argues around your art. And the patent owner can amend the claims during reexamination, which sometimes produces a narrower patent that survives — one that may or may not still read on your product. That is a real risk, not a footnote.

Route two: inter partes review

IPR is the contested proceeding before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. You petition, you participate throughout, there is discovery and briefing and an oral hearing, and you argue your art rather than handing it over and hoping.

It is a genuinely powerful tool. It is also substantially more expensive, and it carries two features that make it the wrong instrument for most marketplace sellers.

Estoppel. A petitioner who receives a final written decision is barred from later raising grounds that were raised or reasonably could have been raised. Lose an IPR and you have narrowed your own defenses in any subsequent litigation. That is a serious commitment.

Timing bars. There is a window measured from service of an infringement complaint, and it closes. A seller who has been sued and waits may find the option gone entirely.

The prior art constraint nobody mentions

Both proceedings are limited to patents and printed publications. This is where seller cases most often fall apart, and it is worth understanding before you spend anything.

Sellers frequently know, with certainty, that the claimed invention was already being sold years before the patent was filed. Sometimes they were selling it. That knowledge is genuinely valuable — but it has to be documented to be usable here.

What works: dated catalogs, product manuals, archived web pages, dated marketplace listings, trade publications, technical articles, earlier patents and published applications, academic literature.

What doesn't, in these proceedings: the physical product on your shelf, your recollection, a supplier's word that they've made it for a decade.

So the first real question in any validity challenge is not "is this patent bad." It is "can we prove it was bad using documents that existed before the filing date." Those are different questions and only one of them is answerable by searching.

Choosing between them

Ex parte reexamination tends to fit where the art is strong enough to speak for itself, cost matters, anonymity is valuable, and you are not already in litigation.

IPR tends to fit where the stakes justify the spend, the art needs advocacy rather than just presentation, you are already litigating, and you can accept estoppel.

Neither fits where the art is thin, where the dispute is really about infringement rather than validity, or where the economics don't support it — which brings us to the honest part.

When it isn't worth it

For a single accused listing, a validity challenge is almost always the wrong tool. It costs more and takes longer than resolving the dispute on non-infringement, and the outcome is uncertain.

The math starts working when:

• The same patent has been asserted against you more than once
• It reads on a product category you sell in, not one item
• Multiple sellers are affected and can share the cost — this is more common and more workable than sellers assume
• The revenue at stake makes permanently removing the threat worth more than defending repeatedly
• The prior art is genuinely strong and genuinely documented

If none of those apply, defend the listing and move on. We will say so.

Frequently asked

General information only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by this post. Availability of particular proceedings, timing bars, estoppel consequences, and USPTO fees depend on the specific facts and are subject to change. Attorney advertising. Related: APEX defense · patent services · IP litigation

Patent

You Got an APEX Notice. You Have Three Options and One of Them Is a Trap.

Accept, opt out, or participate. Each door leads somewhere different, the deadline is short, and the one that sounds like relief is often the one that invites a lawsuit.

By Kenneth G. Eade, CA Bar No. 93774, with Michael S. Brandt, USPTO Reg. No. 39119 · August 2, 2026

An APEX notice arrives without warning and gives you a short window to decide something consequential. Most sellers read it once, feel the deadline, and pick whichever option seems least frightening. That is the wrong basis for the decision, because the three options don't differ in difficulty — they differ in where they leave you six months from now.

What APEX actually is

Amazon Patent Evaluation Express is a private, fast-track proceeding. A utility patent owner alleges that your product infringes. A neutral third-party evaluator — typically a patent attorney — reviews written submissions from both sides and decides whether the accused listing infringes the asserted claims.

Three things it is not. It is not a court proceeding. It does not adjudicate validity — the evaluator takes the patent as issued and asks only about infringement. And it does not produce a binding judgment between the parties. What it does determine, quite decisively, is whether your listing stays up.

Both sides post a deposit, and the prevailing side generally gets theirs back. Check the current amount and the exact response deadline in the notice you received rather than relying on any figure you read online, including here — Amazon adjusts the program.

Option one: do nothing

Technically not an option, but it is what happens most often, so it belongs on the list. The accused listings generally come down by default. No evaluator considers the merits. No deposit is at risk because none was posted.

The trap here is that doing nothing feels like a neutral holding position — as if the matter stays open and you can address it later. It doesn't. The listing is gone, and the patent owner has learned that filing an APEX against you works.

Option two: opt out — the one that's usually a trap

Opting out removes the dispute from Amazon's process. Sellers reach for it because it sounds like escaping an unfair private tribunal. Two things they miss:

It does not preserve your listing. Opting out of the evaluation does not resolve the underlying complaint in your favor.

It does not make the patent owner go away. It removes the cheap, fast, contained forum and leaves the expensive, slow, uncontained one — federal court. A patent owner who was willing to spend a modest deposit on an evaluation may now be looking at a seller who has declined the low-cost process, and some read that as an invitation.

Opting out is a legitimate strategic choice in specific circumstances: where you are prepared to defend the patent claim in federal court, where a declaratory judgment action is contemplated, or where the patent is weak enough that a broader challenge to validity makes sense. Those are deliberate decisions made with counsel who has read the patent.

It is a poor choice made simply to dodge a deadline or avoid a deposit.

Option three: participate

You post the deposit and submit a written response arguing non-infringement. The evaluator considers both submissions and decides.

For a seller with a genuine non-infringement position, this is frequently the best available option: it is fast, contained, far cheaper than litigation, and a favorable evaluation resolves the listing problem directly.

The catch is what "a genuine non-infringement position" means, because it is narrower than sellers expect.

What the evaluator is actually asking

One question: does the accused product contain every element of at least one asserted claim, as those claim terms are properly construed?

That is it. Which means the arguments sellers instinctively reach for are, in this forum, entirely beside the point:

• "My product looks different" — irrelevant unless the difference maps onto a claim element
• "I bought it from a legitimate supplier" — sourcing is not a defense to patent infringement
• "This patent shouldn't have issued" — validity is not before the evaluator
• "They're using this to knock out competitors" — motive is not an element
• "I've been selling this for years" — prior use by you is not a defense here

A response built on any of those loses, not because the evaluator is unfair, but because it never addressed the question. Winning requires reading the claims, construing the terms, and showing that at least one element is missing from your product. That is patent work, and it is why the response needs a patent attorney rather than an appeal consultant.

Winning APEX doesn't kill the patent

Worth internalizing before you celebrate. A favorable evaluation means the evaluator concluded your product likely doesn't infringe. The patent remains in force. The owner can assert it against your next product, against a modified version, or in federal court where validity is on the table.

Conversely, losing APEX does not mean the patent has been adjudicated valid — you simply lost an infringement assessment.

Where the underlying patent is genuinely weak — where the claimed invention was already in the market, or the prior art is obvious — the durable fix is challenging validity at the USPTO through reexamination. Different proceeding, different economics, different timeline. But if the same patent is being asserted against you repeatedly, or against a whole category you sell in, winning APEX each time is treating symptoms.

What to do in the first 48 hours

Find the deadline. Everything else is secondary.

Pull the patent. Not the complaint — the actual patent, and specifically the claims. The independent claims are where the analysis starts.

Identify the accused ASINs precisely. Patent owners sometimes sweep in listings that don't practice the claim at all.

Get a claim chart before you decide. Element-by-element, claim language against your product. That chart tells you whether you have a non-infringement position — and therefore which of the three doors makes sense. Deciding before you have it is guessing.

Don't modify the listing hoping it goes away. It doesn't, and it can complicate the record.

Frequently asked

General information only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by this post. APEX program terms, deposit amounts, and deadlines are set by Amazon and change — follow the notice you received. Attorney advertising. Related: APEX timeline · appealing an APEX decision · reexamination

Trademark

Someone Trademarked My Brand. In the US, That May Not Matter.

You sold under the name for years and never registered it. Now a stranger holds the certificate — and is filing complaints against your listings. Here is why being first to use can beat being first to file.

By Kenneth G. Eade, CA Bar No. 93774 · August 2, 2026

The call usually starts the same way. A seller built a brand, sold under it for three or four years, never got around to registering it because things were working. Then a stranger's registration appears on the USPTO database — and shortly after, IP complaints start landing on their own listings.

Most sellers assume the fight is over. It usually isn't.

The rule most sellers get backwards

Many countries run first-to-file systems: register first, own the mark, full stop. Sellers who come from those systems — or who absorbed the idea from a forum post — assume the United States works the same way.

It doesn't. In the US, trademark rights arise from use in commerce. Registration is genuinely valuable, but it is evidence of a right rather than the origin of one. A party who used the mark in US commerce before the registrant filed may hold superior rights and may petition the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to cancel the registration under Section 14 of the Lanham Act.

Your EU or Canadian registration does not help you here

This is the most expensive misunderstanding we see from brand owners outside the United States. Trademark rights are territorial. EUIPO, UKIPO, CIPO, and CNIPA registrations confer exactly zero rights in the US.

It cuts both ways, and both directions hurt. Against you: when a third party registers your brand domestically, you generally cannot defeat that registration by producing your European certificate — the Board wants to know what you did in US commerce and when. Against them: your foreign registration also won't stop a US seller from adopting the same name here in good faith.

There is a further wrinkle worth understanding, because it explains how these registrations issue in the first place. US law permits a registration to issue to a foreign applicant based on a home-country registration under Section 44, or through a Madrid Protocol extension — without the applicant ever having sold anything in the United States. These are legitimate statutory routes used properly every day. But a registration obtained this way, sitting on the register while the registrant does no genuine US business, is substantially more vulnerable than one backed by years of real commerce.

The five-year cliff

Timing matters more here than in most legal problems, and the reason is structural.

Within five years of registration, you can seek cancellation on essentially any ground that would have barred registration in the first place — including likelihood of confusion with your prior-used mark. That is the core priority ground and usually the strongest argument a prior user has.

After five years, Section 14 narrows the grounds to a defined statutory list: abandonment, fraud, genericness, functionality, certain misuse. Ordinary likelihood of confusion based on your prior use is no longer available.

Sellers routinely discover a hijacked registration, feel overwhelmed, and set it aside to deal with when things calm down. That instinct is expensive here. The clock runs from the registration date, not from the date you found out — and the ground you most want is the one that disappears.

Two cheaper routes most sellers have never heard of

A contested TTAB cancellation is not the only tool, and it is frequently not the right first tool. The Trademark Modernization Act created two ex parte proceedings — meaning the challenge runs between you and the USPTO rather than against an opposing party litigating the schedule.

Expungement targets a registration where the mark was never used in US commerce for the registered goods. Reexamination targets a registration where the mark was not in use as of the relevant date, even if it was used at some other point. Both skip discovery entirely. Both are dramatically cheaper than contested cancellation.

Both are also available only during defined windows measured from the registration date, so the same timing discipline applies. We check the registration file before anything else, every time, because the cheapest available route should be evaluated before anyone files a contested proceeding.

The Brand Registry problem makes this urgent

Here is what turns a slow legal problem into an emergency. A federal registration generally satisfies Brand Registry enrollment criteria. So the party who registered your brand name can enroll it, take control of listing content and variations, and gain access to enforcement tools — including filing infringement complaints against the seller who actually built the brand.

You end up defending IP complaints on your own brand, filed by someone who never sold a unit of it, while your listings come down and your account health degrades.

That creates two clocks running at very different speeds. The platform clock runs in days and has to be managed through the marketplace's IP dispute process right now. The rights clock runs on USPTO timelines and is the actual fix. Sellers who address only the platform side keep losing listings to a capability that never goes away. Sellers who address only the rights side sometimes lose the account before the proceeding concludes. Both have to run at once.

What to do first — and what not to do

Do not contact the registrant yet. Not an angry message, not an offer to buy the mark. Premature contact tells them a challenge is coming, lets them prepare, and can prompt them to escalate marketplace complaints against you first. An unconsidered email can itself become evidence.

Gather dated proof of first use instead. Sales records showing the mark on real transactions. Supplier invoices bearing it. Marketplace listing histories. Archived captures of your site. Dated press coverage. Domain registration records. Third-party-held documents beat anything you could have created yesterday, and you need to establish continuous use — not just a first date — because a gap invites an abandonment argument against you.

Collect it now. Listing histories get truncated, web archives are incomplete, and suppliers go out of business and stop answering email. Every month of delay makes the record harder to assemble, and the evidence you can produce is the entire case.

Is it worth fighting?

It's an economic decision and an honest advisor should say so. Weigh the revenue attached to the brand, the strength of your documented prior use, whether the cheaper ex parte routes are open, and the realistic cost of rebranding — which includes lost review history, lost ranking, new packaging, and the real possibility that the same thing happens to the new name if you leave it unregistered again.

An established brand with substantial revenue and solid evidence of prior use is usually worth defending. A recently launched brand with modest sales and thin documentation is often better served by rebranding and registering properly this time.

Frequently asked

General information only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by this post. Trademark priority, available grounds, and applicable filing windows depend on the specific facts and the registration file, and the governing rules change. Attorney advertising. Related: expungement · opposition · Brand Registry

EUR 30,000 Frozen Over a EUR 25.86 Sale: How We Won a Schedule A TRO Release in Talbert v. The Individuals

The short answer: A European e-commerce seller named in the Schedule A lawsuit Angela Jean Talbert v. The Individuals, et al., Case No. 1:25-cv-06518 (N.D. Ga.), had roughly €30,000 frozen across its Stripe, Shopify, and Amazon accounts — over a single sale of €25.86. AMZ Sellers Attorney documented the actual sales record, confronted plaintiff’s counsel with the more-than-1,000-to-1 disproportion between the freeze and the accused sales, and negotiated our client’s dismissal from the lawsuit with the frozen funds released — without protracted litigation. Said AMZ Sellers Attorney's founder, Kenneth Eade, "This is typical of these Schedule A litigation mills. They set a dragnet over all the sellers offering a product, and hope to get them to settle. The problem is they have no urgency to settle quickly like our clients. We supply the urgency."

What Happened in Talbert v. The Individuals?

The plaintiff, Angela Jean Talbert, filed a Schedule A copyright and trademark infringement action in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia against a long list of online sellers identified only in a sealed exhibit. Like most Schedule A cases, the complaint was accompanied by an ex parte application for a temporary restraining order. The court granted the TRO, and the freeze hit our client’s payment infrastructure across three platforms at once: Stripe, two Shopify storefronts, and Amazon.com.

Our client — a European online seller — had listed a flower press product (“Presse à fleurs”) without any knowledge of the plaintiff’s claimed copyrights or trademarks. The complete sales history of the accused product: one order, totaling €25.86.

The amount frozen: approximately €30,000.

Why Do Schedule A TROs Freeze So Much More Than the Claims Are Worth?

Because they are designed to. Schedule A plaintiffs seek asset restraints covering every account a defendant holds, not an amount tied to the alleged infringement. The freeze itself becomes the settlement leverage: a seller staring at a six-figure or five-figure hold over a trivial number of accused sales faces enormous pressure to pay whatever is demanded just to get operating capital back.

Courts grant these orders ex parte — without hearing from the defendants — on the theory that notice would allow asset flight. The practical result is that hundreds of sellers, many of them abroad, wake up to frozen Amazon disbursements, frozen Stripe balances, and locked Shopify payouts before they have ever seen the complaint.

How We Got the Funds Released

The core of the defense was proportionality, proven with the client’s own records:

1. Documenting the actual sales. We pulled the complete order history across the client’s Shopify stores and reconciled it against the accused listing, establishing that exactly one unit of the accused product had ever sold — for €25.86.

2. Confronting the disproportion. A restraint of €30,000 against €25.86 in accused sales is a freeze of more than one thousand times the amount plausibly at issue. Equity does not favor restraints wildly disproportionate to any conceivable recovery, and plaintiff’s counsel know that an over-broad freeze is vulnerable if challenged before the court.

3. Establishing innocent intent. Our client had no knowledge of the plaintiff’s claimed rights — a posture inconsistent with the willful-counterfeiter narrative that Schedule A complaints depend on, and one that matters to both statutory damages exposure and settlement value.

4. Negotiating from strength. With the record assembled, we engaged plaintiff’s counsel directly and resolved the matter: our client dismissed from the case, and the hold on its funds released.

What Should You Do If a Schedule A TRO Freezes Your Funds?

Do not ignore it. Default means a judgment and permanent loss of the frozen money. Do not panic-pay. Demands in these cases are typically pegged to the amount frozen, not to your actual exposure. Instead: preserve your sales records immediately, calculate your true accused-product revenue, calendar the response deadline, and get counsel who handles Schedule A defense regularly. Whether the right path is negotiation, a motion to dissolve or modify the TRO, or contesting personal jurisdiction depends on your facts — but in almost every case, the gap between what you actually sold and what was frozen is your leverage.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Schedule A lawsuit?

A Schedule A lawsuit is a mass intellectual property case in which a plaintiff sues dozens or hundreds of online sellers at once, identifying them only in a sealed exhibit called “Schedule A.” The plaintiff typically obtains an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) that freezes the defendants’ marketplace and payment accounts — including Amazon, Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, and Payoneer — before the sellers even know they have been sued.

Why were my Amazon, Shopify, or Stripe funds frozen without notice?

Schedule A plaintiffs request TROs ex parte, meaning without notifying the defendants, arguing that advance notice would let sellers move assets. Courts routinely grant these orders, and the platforms comply by freezing every account listed. Many sellers first learn of the lawsuit when their funds disappear.

Can a TRO freeze more money than my actual sales of the accused product?

It happens constantly — but disproportionality is also your strongest leverage. In Talbert v. The Individuals, our client’s total sales of the accused product were €25.86, yet approximately €30,000 was frozen — a restraint of more than one thousand times the amount at issue. Documenting that gap with sales records is often the key to negotiating a release or persuading the court to modify the order.

Should I just pay the settlement demand in a Schedule A case?

Not before your actual exposure is assessed. Schedule A settlement demands are frequently calibrated to the amount frozen rather than to actual sales or damages. Where accused sales are minimal, counsel can often negotiate dismissal and release of funds on far better terms — or contest the freeze itself.

How long does it take to get funds released from a Schedule A freeze?

It varies with the case and the plaintiff’s counsel. A documented, disproportionality-based approach can produce a negotiated dismissal and release within weeks, while contested motions to dissolve or modify a TRO or preliminary injunction follow the court’s briefing schedule. Acting before default deadlines pass is critical.

Do foreign sellers have to respond to a US Schedule A lawsuit?

Yes — if they want their money back. Ignoring the case usually leads to a default judgment and permanent loss of the frozen funds. Foreign sellers, including European and Chinese sellers, can appear through US counsel to negotiate, contest jurisdiction, or challenge the freeze without traveling to the United States.

Frozen by a Schedule A TRO? Talk to Us First.

AMZ Sellers Attorney defends online sellers in Schedule A lawsuits and TRO freezes across Amazon, Shopify, Stripe, Walmart, Etsy, eBay, and TikTok Shop. Founded by a former seven-figure Amazon seller, the firm is Sermondo Top 10-listed and has resolved marketplace freezes and IP disputes for sellers worldwide.

Call (888) 806-2440 or email [email protected] for a case evaluation. The sooner you act after a freeze, the more options you have.

This article discusses a resolved matter and general legal principles. It is attorney advertising and not legal advice; outcomes depend on the facts of each case.