His VERY Simple Idea is an Amazon Hit (youtube.com)
‘He defeated 500 copycats.’ It took about a month or two after he launched the product on Amazon, with ‘patent pending’, for the copycats to start. It was a Top Seller. He contacted Amazon Brand Registry to remove these listings, since they will take down anything even closely similar, and he got denied within like 20 minutes. So he waited a year to get the patent, and thought that would get him help from Amazon, but nope. So he contacted attorneys, some of them said they'd police the listings and take them down for him, for around $500 a month. Another company, though, would do something like a temporary restraining order, against around 500 copycats, and they go to the court and say their clients patent is being infringed and they need to take action, the court approves and the lawyer goes to Amazon and Walmart and other marketplaces and says these sellers need to have their accounts frozen. And now these account owners have to go through court if they want to push further, but this can result in payments from them to the design patent holder.
An Amazon design patent can be better than a government patent, because Amazon, if they see a similar product, will just take it down, is said, but this guy said that maybe isn't really the case. But without it, you don't have any type of protection, even if you at least have a little original design.
But it seems you can get around the design patent by making improvements on their design.
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Probably a trillion-dollar question: ‘Can Chinese apps collect that data, or are they collecting it?' ‘Are they breaking US laws?’