Brand registry is (mostly) irrelevant for my category, but how can it even be logical/sensible for any seller to create their own brand for goods that already have a brand name ??! - eg. sellers rebranding 'Cadburys' with their own 'made-up' name, or any other well known brand name. I fear Amazon opened up a can of worms when they allowed BR, and all it has done is created endless problems for sellers, with brand ownership issues (as mentioned in your post). I admit I know nothing about the whole process of BR, but going by the number of posts on the forum with sellers encountering problems, it is obviously a nightmare for many.

Echoing what Jilly posted, I think Brand Registry should be separated from BMVD.

Practically no sellers of mainstream books, video or music media are 'brand owners' yet when we attempt to make changes to glaringly obvious catalogue errors we are told we cannot make updates because we are not 'brand owners' .

It then becomes a fight with SS to stop redirecting us to the Brand Registry for simple corrections.

I believe this is one of the main reasons the BMVD catalogue (and the book category in particular) is in such a mess.

It seems that once a title goes out-of-print, the publishers virtually abandon it and certain sellers (and/or Amazon bots?) have the ability to alter images and change other details.

Getting them changed back to what they should be is almost impossible in real terms, due to 'BR' blocking further changes.

There is also the problem of dropshippers adding literally millions of mangled cloned titles with redundant ASINs to existing ASINs. It has become so bad that these cloned ASINs now tend to dominate search results for OOP titles.