Digital Isle v Marcos Enterprise: Amazon seller complaints found defamatory in High Court ruling

A High Court judgement handed down on 19 March 2026 has clarified how complaints made by one Amazon seller against another are to be interpreted under the law of defamation, with Mrs Justice Tipples DBE finding in Digital Isle Limited v Marcos Enterprise Limited & Andreas Marcou [2026] EWHC 642 (KB) that statements alleging counterfeit goods and trademark infringement were defamatory of the claimant at common law.

The claim arose from complaints made in June 2023 by the second defendant, Andreas Marcou, through his Amazon seller account, in which he alleged that the claimant — trading on Amazon as TRSalesUK — was selling counterfeit Velcro products and illegally using Velcro's branding alongside its own. The complaints resulted in the claimant's Amazon listing being removed following an email from Amazon citing a buyer complaint about product authenticity.

The trial before Mrs Justice Tipples concerned only preliminary issues: the natural and ordinary meaning of the 3 June 2023 complaint to Amazon, whether that meaning was defamatory at common law, and whether the words constituted statements of fact or expressions of opinion.

Determining meaning

Applying the principles set out in Koutsogiannis v The Random House Group Ltd [2020] 4 WLR 25, the court assessed the single meaning a hypothetical ordinary reasonable reader would attribute to the complaint. The judge noted that the sole publishee was Amazon, an entity that would have understood the communication through the lens of its own seller platform, and specifically within a category headed "Product not as described".

The claimant argued that the complaint carried a Chase level 1 meaning — a direct allegation of actual wrongdoing. The defendants contended that the second aspect of the meaning, concerning trademark infringement, should be pitched at Chase level 3, reflecting grounds for investigation rather than a concluded assertion of guilt.

The court rejected the defendants' formulation. Pointing to unequivocal language — including references to the claimant "ILLEGALLY using" Velcro's branding and being "engaged in illegal activity" — Mrs Justice Tipples held that the hypothetical reasonable reader would understand the complaint as asserting that the claimant had sold counterfeit goods and had infringed Velcro's trademark rights by placing Velcro's branding alongside its own to suggest it was the manufacturer.

The court also declined to adopt the defendants' preferred characterisation of the goods as "inauthentic" rather than "counterfeit", noting that the word "inauthentic" did not appear anywhere in the complaint itself, and that Amazon's subsequent use of the term in correspondence was inadmissible to the meaning question.

Fact and opinion

On the question of fact versus opinion, the court distinguished between the two aspects of its meaning. The identification of the claimant's goods as counterfeit was found to be a statement of fact: it was, in the context of a "Product not as described" complaint, the very reason the product was said to differ from its description. By contrast, the allegations of illegal conduct and trademark infringement were characterised as expressions of opinion, being inferences drawn by the defendants from their experience of the product. Crucially, the basis of that opinion was disclosed within the complaint itself, satisfying the requirement under section 3 of the Defamation Act 2013.

Defamatory at common law

Applying the test from Triplark Limited v Northwood Hall (Freehold) Limited — whether the words' tendency was to cause a substantial adverse effect on people's attitudes towards the claimant — the court had little difficulty finding the complaint defamatory. The consequences were concrete: the claimant's listing had been suspended, directly impairing its ability to trade.

The judgement is a useful reminder that the platform or medium through which words are published, and the identity of the audience, bear materially on how meaning is assessed — even where the publication reaches only a single reader.

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