Net Enforcers Sony drama - help needed

For the last couple of years our company has had to deal with Net Enforcers telling us we don't have the right to sell the products we have purchased for resale from legitimate sources because it shows a picture and description of the Sony product (though they say it is fine to sell it so long as we don't use a picture or description which is asinine). We have tried contacting Sony several times to get a commerce license so that we don't have to deal with this BS drama but every attempt at contacting them has been met with no response.

Lately things have gotten worse with Net Enforcers. Instead of contacting us directly to simply have us remove the offending content like they have done in the past (and we have always complied) they have started contacting our ISP and web hosting companies to get us shut down instead of contacting us AT ALL!

This is getting ridiculous and I need to find out who with Sony to contact so we can nip any future crap like this in the bud. Can anyone point me to the correct department, person, whoever to speak with at Sony to get this licensing issue taken care of? So far I have called their Operating Headquarters (800-686-7669) and get hung up on each time.

I would prefer this to disabling the thousands of Sony products we sell through various venues. Previously Net Enforcers has only contacted us with a small handful that they claim are in violation of DMCA.

What did Net Enforcers say when you sent them proof that you had the right to show the images?

It sounds like you need to get your attorney involved and ask him to help you out. If you don't have one, Internet Litigators is someone I would recommend.

I would not recommend dealing with them directly, but you could always send a certified letter to them in care of the attorney of record.

At the moment NetEnforcers is not responding to any of our inquiries despite repeated attempts at contacting them regarding this.

Recently they also placed an order with us for a Sony item.

Has anyone else had this much difficulty actually reaching this company after they initiate a legal matter with a deadline???

We finally managed to get up with NetEnforcers to get this resolved. Apparently there was some sort of email issue on their end or ours preventing DMCA notices from getting through. We are now working with them to get these cleared up after the initial confusion and griping.

Sony, on the other hand, is still very difficult to reach. I guess I will have to continue calling until I figure out just exactly who needs to be spoken with in their business to consumer sales division.

Try the Sony Professional Services department:
1-866-766-9272
8:30 AM to 8:00 PM EST

They are still not sending us notices directly. This time they had our datacenter shut down for some random product we were not aware of its picture being copyrighted. No email, phone, or postal mail. They just contacted them directly and left us out of the loop.

I think I will have to seek legal counsel about this. This time it has cost us thousands in lost customer and sales.

technically speaking you don't have the right to display sony trademarks on your website without permission from the trademark holder (sony).

as a rule of thumb about every mainstream commercial product has all the necessary trademarks, copyrights, and patents that are obtainable (rather cheap investment) and if you plan to use anything related to their products, they already have that scenario covered by an expensive lawyer and you need to get written permission from them to use their trademarks.

The web site in question resells through a distribution channel that is licensed by Sony. The only way this distributor makes their sales of Sony products is through independent resellers, not on its own. That being said, should they push inventory of one of their Sony licensed products to one of our sites then one might think we had the right to sell it on their, and consequently Sony's, behalf. So without that distributor's resellers that distributor sells NO Sony products.

After contacting Sony, come to find out there are only a small sampling of random products that they have restrictions on and therefore no way for anyone to know in advance that the images and descriptions associated with that tiny little portion of Sony products is restricted except to one by one get on the phone with Sony and model by model out of all their thousands of products go over each one with the hapless attendant you get on the phone for hour on tedious hour and most of them won't even know for sure and will have to repeatedly get their supervisor on the phone who will eventually just tell them to hang up. They don't even inform their license holding distributors which products are restricted when they supply them a new inventory list. They just send the likes of Net Enforcers out to deal with it in retrospect.

Maybe it is time to contact an attorney and reach out to them through your attorney. You should work out a deal with them where they simply ask you to remove something and you do it.

It's really your responsibility to contact them, they have no obligation to let you in on any information. If they shun you off then you might just have to accept that as how business is.

Yeh they make money through resellers, because they don't sell products individually. But they chose the resellers that they do for a number of reasons. If sony doesn't want to have you resell their products, then you might need to look for another supplier. It sucks to hear it from this angle, but it's how things work.

I've been in your shoes dealing with netenforcers and sony. I think you should drop sony and forget about it. I had much worse problems with the both of them in the past. Netenforcers had my old employers website shut down for showing a sony product on their website. This was a sony authorized brick and mortar store! I have lost any respect for sony. I think their products have gone seriously down hill over the last 20 years. I worked as a salesman and as an installer of their products and I have NOTHING good to say about sony's current products, service, or branding methods. I ALWAYS suggest an alternative product over sony to friends as well as customers now.