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From The Takedown

Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms used in the book. Where a term means different things in different countries, the common idea is described and the main variation flagged.

Agentic commerce: Shopping done on your behalf by an AI agent, which searches, compares and buys without you clicking each step. It creates a new problem for fakes: the agent has no gut instinct, and trusts machine-readable signals a human would never see.
Asset freeze: A court order that locks the money and accounts of a defendant so they can't move funds while a case runs. In counterfeiting cases it's the part that actually bites, because it reaches the seller's payout account rather than just their listing.
Authentication: The work of deciding whether an item is genuine. Done by trained humans, by instruments, by AI, or by all three. The harder the fake, the more it relies on context a machine struggles to read.
Brand registry: A marketplace programme (Amazon Brand Registry is the best known) that lets a brand prove it owns a trademark and gives it faster tools to report fakes. The entry ticket is usually a registered trademark.
Burner listing: A throwaway product listing or seller account, set up to be abandoned the moment it's reported. One operator runs hundreds. Relisting takes minutes, which is why removing listings alone never wins.
Chokepoint: A narrow part of the chain where pressure does disproportionate damage. In this book the payment processor is the chokepoint that matters most, because the money has to land somewhere real.
Consolidator: A middleman who gathers goods from many small workshops and combines them for onward shipping. A pinch point in the supply chain, and a useful target.
Controlled delivery: A monitored, evidence-grade receipt of a purchase, where the parcel and its contents are logged and preserved so they can be used later. The investigative cousin of the test buy.
Counterfeit, knockoff, replica: Loosely used as synonyms, but worth separating. A counterfeit copies a brand's trademark without permission and passes itself off as genuine. A knockoff imitates a design without using the protected mark. A replica is sold openly as a copy. Only the first is straightforwardly illegal in most places, which is why counterfeiters work so hard to look like the third.
Customs recordation: Registering your trademark with a customs service (in the US, with CBP) so border officers can detain and seize suspected fakes on sight. Cheap, underused, and one of the few places enforcement happens before the fake reaches a buyer.
De minimis: The value threshold below which an imported parcel clears customs with little or no duty and minimal inspection. Counterfeiters love it, because a flood of small parcels is far harder to police than a single shipping container.
Default judgment: A court ruling in the plaintiff's favour because the defendant didn't show up to fight. The bulk of mass counterfeiting cases end this way, because anonymous overseas sellers rarely appear.
DMCA: The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Its notice-and-takedown system lets rights holders demand removal of infringing material, and lets the accused file a counter-notice. The engine of the takedown treadmill this book argues against relying on.
E-waste re-marking: Pulling electronic chips out of discarded equipment, cleaning and sanding off the old markings, printing new ones, and selling them as new parts. How counterfeit components end up in serious machinery.
False positive: An enforcement system wrongly flagging a legitimate seller or product as fake. Common with automated matching, and a real cost: genuine businesses get suppressed while the actual counterfeiter relists.
Grey market: Genuine goods sold through channels the brand didn't authorise, often across borders to exploit price differences. Not counterfeit, but the murky channels grey-market goods travel through are exactly where fakes slip in alongside them.
HS code: The Harmonised System code, an international product classification used on customs paperwork. A mismatched or oddly generic HS code on a parcel is a small but useful tell.
Joinder: The legal mechanism for suing many defendants in one case. The engine behind Schedule A litigation, and the part critics say is stretched too far when hundreds of unrelated sellers are bundled together.
MAP: Minimum advertised price, the floor a brand sets for how cheaply its products may be advertised. Wildly broken MAP is often the first sign that the cheap listing isn't what it claims to be.
Mirror grade: Trade slang for the highest tier of superfake, supposedly indistinguishable from the genuine article. Marketing as much as fact, but the best of them are good enough to fool casual authentication.
Notice-and-takedown: The general process of reporting infringing content to a platform and having it removed. Fast, cheap, and on its own, the treadmill.
Parallel imports: Genuine goods imported and sold without the brand's authorisation for that market. A grey-market practice, legal in some places and not others.
Recovery: Getting money back from the counterfeiter, through frozen accounts, settlements or judgments. The step most enforcement skips, and the one that actually changes a counterfeiter's behaviour.
Schedule A litigation: A US tactic, concentrated in the federal court in Chicago, where a brand sues hundreds or thousands of anonymous online sellers in one sealed case, freezes their accounts before they know they have been sued, and collects through settlement or default. The closest thing in this book to a method that hurts counterfeiters, and a contested one. Also called the SAD Scheme by its critics.
Seizure: The confiscation of goods by an authority, usually customs or police. The headline number everyone quotes, and a poor measure of progress, because it counts what was caught, not what got through.
Shipping agent: A service that buys goods on a customer's behalf and forwards them internationally, consolidating parcels along the way. Central to haul culture and to the modern fake-goods supply line.
Superfake: A counterfeit made to a standard high enough that ordinary checks, and sometimes expert ones, fail. Most associated with luxury handbags and watches.
Takedown: The removal of an infringing listing, page or account. The industry's favourite metric and, this book argues, its favourite illusion.
Teardown: Physically taking a product apart to judge whether it's genuine and how it was made. The forensic heart of authentication.
Test buy: Buying a suspected fake to confirm it's fake and to harvest the intelligence that comes with it: the seller, the payment route, the parcel, the paperwork.
Trade dress: The overall look and feel of a product or its packaging, protectable in its own right. What the Kunming stores copied: not a logo on a product, but the whole experience.
Trademark: A registered sign (a name, logo, shape) that identifies a brand's goods. The legal hook on which almost all anti-counterfeiting action hangs. No registered mark, no easy case.
Transhipment: Routing goods through an intermediate country to disguise their origin or exploit weaker controls. A way to launder a parcel's history before it reaches the buyer.
TRO: Temporary restraining order. An emergency court order, often granted without the other side present, that can freeze a defendant's accounts at the very start of a case. The opening move in Schedule A litigation.