A Rockland County business says it was illegally knocked off the Amazon online marketplace by a California company whose beauty products it was reselling.
Sinai Health LLC accused De Roblin Inc. of defamation and tortuous interference, in a complaint filed on Nov. 21 in U.S. District Court, White Plains.
De Roblin, the complaint states, “engaged in a scheme to manipulate, fix, and control the pricing for consumer products on online marketplaces.”
The complaint does not say who operates Sinai Health and exactly where it is located. According to a state registration record, it was incorporated in 2021 and uses a post office box in Tallman as its address.
De Roblin is based in Industry, California and operates the Mia Secret line of beauty products.
Sinai is a third-party reseller. It acquires consumer products on the open market, according to the complaint, and resells them for a profit through Amazon. The ability to sell goods on the e-commerce site is highly advantageous, the company says, given the exposure to a world marketplace “on a scale that no other online retailer can currently provide.”
Sinai claims it has a “near perfect customer rating” on Amazon.
But on Oct. 10, Amazon notified Sinai that its product listings had been removed, for allegedly offering counterfeit products that violated Mia Secret’s trademark.
Amazon does not verify such allegations, Sinai claims, and has a policy of acting on intellectual property complaints “whether legitimate or not.”
But under the “first sale doctrine,” Sinai asserts, once a product is placed in the stream of commerce the manufacturer can no longer enforce intellectual property rights with re-sellers, so long as the product is authentic and unaltered.
Sinai says it procures only genuine Mia Secret products for resale. On Oct. 14, an attorney representing the business asked Mia Secret to retract the trademark infringement claim. Mia Secret “confirmed that they had no evidence of counterfeiting but refused to retract their reports.”
Sinai alleges that Mia Secret has used the same tactics against other online sellers, “to stifle competition by filing false intellectual property complaints.”
Sinai asked the court to declare that it did not infringe on Mia Secret’s intellectual property; rescind the trademark infringement report; restrain Mia Secret from filing complaints with e-commerce platforms; and award unspecified monetary damages.
Mia Secret did not reply to an email that asked for its side of the story.
