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EU Court Holds Amazon Liable for Trademarks

The Amazon logo is seen at the company's logistics center in Bretigny-sur-Orge, near Paris, France, Dec. 7, 2021.
The Amazon logo is seen at the company's logistics center in Bretigny-sur-Orge, near Paris, France, Dec. 7, 2021.

Online retail giant Amazon can potentially be held responsible when third-party sellers on its website misuse trademarks, the European Court of Justice said.

Lower courts in Belgium and Luxembourg asked the EU's top court for an opinion on a case brought by French shoemaker Christian Louboutin.

The firm argued Amazon itself was breaching its trademark by hosting adverts for shoes from third-party sellers featuring its trademark red sole.

The ECJ agreed, saying Amazon users would not necessarily be able to tell if a product was being offered by Amazon or a third-party seller.

"Amazon itself makes use of the sign registered by Louboutin where the user of its site has the impression that it is Amazon which is marketing, in its name and on its behalf, shoes of the trademark," said an ECJ press statement released in French.

The legal opinion does not decide the Louboutin case, which will revert to the courts in Luxembourg and Belgium.

But the opinion is binding on national courts in the EU from now on.

"This is a victory for all the brands that defend their expertise," said Louboutin chief executive Alexis Mourot.

Amazon said it was still studying the opinion.

The French shoemaker is famous for its red-soled footwear and claimed sellers on Amazon were offering "identical" products without the firm's consent.

Louboutin argued that "the disputed advertisements formed an integral part of Amazon's commercial communication", according to the ECJ press statement.

The court agreed, distinguishing Amazon from sites such as eBay, which operates purely as a marketplace for other sellers and does not offer its own products.

Amazon, the court pointed out, displays its own adverts alongside those of third-party sellers and offers the sellers marketing, storage and shipping services.

As a result, users could have the impression that Amazon was offering the disputed products.

Amazon -- along with fellow US tech giants like Apple, Google and Meta -- has faced a slew of legal cases across the EU.

On Tuesday, Amazon settled two EU antitrust inquiries concerning its treatment of third-party sellers.

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Meta Closes Monitoring Tool for Disinformation, Fact-Checking

FILE—People walk behind a Meta Platforms logo during a conference in Mumbai, India, September 20, 2023.
FILE—People walk behind a Meta Platforms logo during a conference in Mumbai, India, September 20, 2023.

WASHINGTON—A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation.

The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations will largely not have access to.

For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year -- a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.

"In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms," Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told AFP.

"It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency."

Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.

It's a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, said is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of AI-enabled falsehoods.

"It's an entire new muscle" that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Silverman told AFP, calling for "openness and transparency."

'Direct threat'

In recent election cycles, researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.

By its own admission, Meta — which bought CrowdTangle in 2016 — said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.

In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them "quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression."

The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.

Lamenting the risk of losing these functions forever, global nonprofit Mozilla Foundation demanded in an open letter to Meta that CrowdTangle be retained at least until January 2025.

"Abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle's core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency," said the letter signed by dozens of tech watchdogs and researchers.

The new tool lacks CrowdTangle features including robust search flexibility and decommissioning it would be a "direct threat" to the integrity of elections, it added.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the letter's claims are "just wrong," insisting the Content Library will contain "more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle" and be made available to academics and non-profit election integrity experts.

'Lot of concerns'

Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.

Journalists have used CrowdTangle in the past to investigate public health crises as well as human rights abuses and natural disasters.

Meta's decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with pirated content.

CrowdTangle has been a crucial source of data that helped "hold Meta accountable for enforcing its policies," Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told AFP.

Organizations that debunk misinformation as part of Meta's third-party fact-checking program, including AFP, will have access to the Content Library.

But other researchers and nonprofits will have to apply for access or look for expensive alternatives. Two researchers told AFP under condition of anonymity that in one-on-one meetings with Meta officials, they demanded firm commitments from company officials.

"While most fact-checkers already working with Meta will have access to the new tool, it's not super clear if many independent researchers — already worried about losing CrowdTangle's functionality — will," Carlos Hernandez-Echevarria, head of the Spanish nonprofit Maldita, told AFP.

"It has generated a lot of concerns."

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