How the Creator Economy Destroyed the Internet

> Copycat Pirouette Skorts have been sold on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, TikTok Shop, DHGate, Temu, Shein, and countless other fly-by-night storefronts that will seemingly disappear as quickly as they popped up.

Are there any moves afoot to adjust laws to make "marketplace" websites liable for the actions of sellers?

Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.

>> Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.

There's tons of counterfeit stuff on Amazon. I'm at the point now where I avoid Amazon because the last five things I bought there were all counterfeit and the products were not limited to one industry. They were across areas you wouldn't think you'd counterfeit stuff.

I mean, the law already holds shops accountable, but problem is regulators let Amazon get away with "We are a marketplace" despite them actually selling stuff as first party and allowing third parties use their logistics and warehouses.

Apparently Amazon is starting to do something about this. They've recently introduced two filtering toggles:

- a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category

- a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.

I'm not sure there's a way to do that, there's no real way for a platform to definitively know if you're selling legitimate items or not and sellers are legitimately allowed to resell any legit items they have bought so there's not even a definitive list of "who's allowed to sell product X" they could query to know.

I don't think anyone is alleging that these are illegitimate? It sounds like it's just copying the style, but not pretending to be the original/infringing on any trademark or anything.

Yes, the article alleges that the dupes are illegitimate:

> They simply use Popflex’s copyrighted images without permission, sometimes editing the color of the skort in the photo to fit the listing. In May 2025 alone, Popflex counted 461 listings it believes infringe on its Pirouette Skort design patent, but it’s still a drop in the bucket of the thousands that Ho has encountered just by doing reverse image searches.

Sounds like a very good idea, although I haven't noticed it yet. So often you are buried in garbage hits.

And they also need to cut it out with the comingled inventory from the new guys!

The "marketplace" loophole which allows a few dominant websites to insulate themselves from consequences for illegitimate sales is at the root of the consolidation decried in the top-level article.

Maybe they could add a filter which removes items from brands with gibberish titles. No, I don't want to buy something from zxutringly or qorduger or any similar nonsense

Define "gibberish title." It's harder than you think!

For example, there's a (Shenzhen-based, but well-established in the US market) 3D printer vendor called "Elegoo." Their name was (apparently...) chosen as an abbreviation of "Electronics with a Googol applications." Does your filter block them?

chinese speakers in particular have a hard time recognizing what kind of names make sense in the english language. mind you, we would have an equally hard time to come up with chinese names that don't sound weird to native speakers.