From Platform Takedown to Compelled Reinstatement: DJ Actions and the Reverse TRO in Yiwu Jieya v. Xu

When a patent owner submits an infringement complaint through Amazon or a similar platform and the product is taken down, the seller typically tries one of two paths: continuing through the platform's internal appeal process, or filing a declaratory judgment action in U.S. federal court seeking declarations of non-infringement and invalidity — commonly called a "DJ action."

But a DJ action does not restore the listing on its own.

Even after a seller files a complaint, the platform may keep the listing down, waiting for the complainant to withdraw or for the court to rule. That gives rise to a harder question:

Early in a DJ action, can the seller ask the court to issue a temporary restraining order directing the patent owner to withdraw the platform complaint and barring further complaints on the same patent?

Yiwu Jieya E-Commerce Co. Ltd. v. Xu offers a useful data point.

There, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington granted the plaintiff's TRO application — after the defendant appeared and opposed — requiring the defendant to withdraw its patent complaints against the plaintiff's Amazon products within 24 hours. The court subsequently entered a preliminary injunction continuing that relief.

LawMay P.C. represented the plaintiff and obtained both the TRO and the subsequent preliminary injunction. Because the matter was ongoing, we had not previously written about it. The case has recently drawn attention from Chinese legal and cross-border e-commerce publications as a practical example of "DJ action plus reverse TRO." We take the opportunity here to address, from counsel's perspective, the proof problem that public coverage has not fully developed, and what the case suggests about the boundaries of reverse TRO practice.

The genuine difficulty of a reverse TRO is that the applicant must construct — against the statutory presumption of patent validity and under the standard for emergency injunctive relief — a showing sufficient to justify immediate judicial intervention.

I. From "Supporting the Appeal" to Judicial Relief: A Shift in the Purpose of the DJ Action

We did not handle this matter from the outset.

The client's Amazon products were removed following a complaint asserting a U.S. utility patent. The client then retained counsel to file a DJ action seeking declarations that the products did not infringe or that the patent was invalid.

One common approach at the appeal stage is to submit the filed DJ complaint, together with a non-infringement analysis, to Amazon, on the theory that a platform will take a seller's non-infringement position more seriously once the dispute has been formally placed before a U.S. federal court.

In practice, however, that path tends to have limited effect. A complaint shows that a plaintiff has asserted certain legal contentions; it does not show that a court has adjudicated them. From the platform's perspective, there remains a distance between "a case has been filed" and "a court has found the patent invalid or the product non-infringing," and platforms generally will not reverse a takedown on the fact of filing alone.

When we came into the matter, the products were still down, and listing rank, customer traffic, the selling window, and inventory value were all under continuing pressure. On those facts, the objective of the litigation needed to be redefined.

II. Rebuilding the Complaint for a Reverse TRO

A reverse TRO is not simply a motion appended to an ordinary DJ complaint.

To obtain a TRO, a plaintiff must show a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits, and that absent timely intervention it will suffer harm that cannot adequately be remedied by money damages after the fact.

After taking over, we first rewrote the complaint, reorganizing the facts and the legal structure of the case around emergency relief:

• establishing a real, concrete patent dispute between the parties, justiciable in federal court;
• setting out in full the patent complaint, the takedown, and the failure of the platform appeal;
• organizing invalidity and non-infringement into mutually reinforcing substantive arguments;
• demonstrating that the takedown was causing continuing, compounding, and largely irreversible business harm; and
• proposing specific relief the court could enforce directly, including an order that the complainant withdraw its complaints and refrain from submitting further ones.

The DJ action supplied the procedural vehicle into federal court. The rebuilt complaint supplied the factual and legal basis for the reverse TRO.

III. Why a Reverse TRO Is Not the Mirror Image of a Conventional Patent Injunction

Cross-border sellers are generally more familiar with TROs sought by rights holders.

In conventional cross-border IP litigation, a rights holder seeks a TRO to freeze funds, restrict sales, preserve evidence, or require a platform to take interim measures. The direction is this: the rights holder asks the court to restrain the accused seller's operations.

A reverse TRO runs the other way: the seller subject to the complaint and the takedown asks the court to restrain the complainant and to order withdrawal of the platform complaint.

Here we asked the court to:

• order the defendant to withdraw its patent complaints against the plaintiff's Amazon products; and
• bar the defendant, during the litigation, from submitting further complaints on the same patent to Amazon or other platforms.

The court did not issue relief without notice. It required the defendant to respond; the defendant filed an opposition; the plaintiff replied; and the court then granted the TRO.

On the surface, a reverse TRO merely inverts the direction of a conventional TRO. In practice the two are not symmetrical.

On a conventional TRO, a court considers whether to restrain allegedly infringing conduct on an interim basis. On a reverse TRO, the court must consider whether, early in a case, to restrain a rights holder — who on the face of it holds a valid patent — from continuing to exercise its platform complaint rights.

• A patent enjoys a statutory presumption of validity.
• Courts are generally reluctant to restrain a rights holder's enforcement before the facts are developed.
• Platform complaints are part of a private governance mechanism, and courts assess carefully whether judicial intervention is warranted.
• Any injunction must be specific enough to be enforceable without unduly restricting the rights holder's legitimate litigation and enforcement activity.

These differences mean that conventional patent injunction doctrine cannot be applied mechanically to a reverse TRO.

IV. The Inversion of the Burden: How "Substantial Question" Works Against the Applicant

One of the hardest features of a reverse TRO is that, once the parties' roles are switched, conventional patent injunction doctrine operates against the seller.

On a TRO or preliminary injunction sought by a patent owner, the owner must show a likelihood of success on validity and infringement. The accused infringer generally need not conclusively prove invalidity or non-infringement at the injunction stage. It is often enough to raise a sufficiently substantial question as to validity or infringement to defeat the patentee's showing.

In a reverse TRO the litigation positions are exactly reversed.

The seller becomes the applicant and must affirmatively show that its invalidity or non-infringement theory is likely to succeed. Showing merely that validity is questionable, or that the product may not infringe, will generally not suffice to support an order compelling withdrawal of the complaints.

At the same time, the rights holder need only raise a sufficiently substantial question about the seller's invalidity or non-infringement theory — enough for the court to conclude that the issue requires discovery, expert opinion, or trial — to defeat the seller's showing.

"Substantial question" thus has a near-symmetrical but opposite effect once the roles are reversed:

• On a conventional TRO, the accused infringer need only raise a substantial question as to validity or infringement to block the patentee's injunction.
• On a reverse TRO, the seller, as applicant, must affirmatively establish a likelihood of success on invalidity or non-infringement — not merely raise a substantial question — while the rights holder can block relief by raising one.

Given the statutory presumption of validity, that burden is particularly heavy.

The applicant must establish a likelihood of success on invalidity or non-infringement before discovery and expert proceedings have occurred. If the court concludes that the issues require further adjudication, the reverse TRO may not issue.

The applicant therefore needs a more constraining argument — one that narrows the room for the rights holder to push the case back into ordinary factual dispute by offering an alternative but plausible reading.

The central litigation design in Jieya was aimed precisely at this proof problem.

V. The Validity–Infringement Dilemma in Jieya

One fact was pivotal: before the effective filing date of the asserted patent, products identical to the accused products were already publicly on sale.

That fact supplied an important basis for invalidity. If the applicant could show that the prior sale constituted prior art under applicable law, and that the prior product embodied every limitation of the relevant claim, the evidence could strongly support invalidity.

At the reverse TRO stage, however, showing merely that an identical product predated the patent will generally not establish likelihood of success on its own. The patent is presumed valid, and the rights holder may still contest the timing of the sale, the extent of public disclosure, whether the products were in fact identical, the reliability of the evidence, and whether the prior product embodied every claim limitation. If the court concludes that these issues require further development, an invalidity theory resting on prior sale alone may not support emergency relief.

At the same time, the Federal Circuit has made clear that practicing the prior art is not itself a defense of literal non-infringement. Literal infringement is assessed by comparing the properly construed claims with the accused product; the relationship between the accused product and the prior art ordinarily goes to validity. See Tate Access Floors, Inc. v. Interface Architectural Resources, Inc., 279 F.3d 1357 (Fed. Cir. 2002); Baxter Healthcare Corp. v. Spectramed, Inc., 49 F.3d 1575 (Fed. Cir. 1995).

That rule matters especially on a reverse TRO. An applicant cannot move from "an identical product predated the patent" directly to "the present product does not infringe." To build a more constraining likelihood-of-success showing at the TRO stage, we tied the prior sale and the patent owner's present infringement position to the same product and the same claim scope.

• If the asserted patent's scope is broad enough to cover the identical product long on public sale, that prior sale directly threatens validity.
• If the prior product falls outside the patent's scope, then the identical product now complained of should not infringe either.

If the patent owner maintains that the claims cover the plaintiff's product, that position strengthens its infringement case but makes the prior sale a direct obstacle to validity. If it narrows the claim scope to avoid the prior sale, it correspondingly weakens its infringement allegations as to the present product.

This structure does not require the court to conduct a full invalidity trial at the TRO stage. It requires the patent owner to take a consistent position as to the same product and the same claim scope, and to explain:

Why does the same product fall within the patent's scope for purposes of infringement, but outside it for purposes of the prior sale?

The court ultimately found that the plaintiff had established a likelihood of success on invalidity or non-infringement.

The value of the dilemma is that it converts invalidity and non-infringement from two independent theories — each easily mired in factual dispute — into a single, mutually constraining analysis of claim-scope consistency, reducing the room for a rights holder to defeat emergency relief simply by manufacturing a dispute.

VI. Why Platform Takedown Harm Resists Monetary Compensation

Even where likelihood of success is established, a reverse TRO must still address irreparable harm.

The court must assess why the seller cannot simply await final judgment and be made whole in damages.

An established platform listing represents more than current sales. It typically embodies accumulated search rank, customer reviews, click-through and conversion rates, advertising data, customer entry points, platform weighting, and market position.

Once a product is delisted, those assets degrade continuously:

• search rank falls steadily;
• paid and organic traffic is interrupted;
• existing customers move to competing products;
• peak seasons and selling windows cannot be recovered;
• inventory continues to generate storage and disposal pressure; and
• even if the listing is later restored, it may not return to its former position.

These harms are cumulative and path-dependent, and are difficult to quantify or restore after the fact. They therefore cannot simply be treated as purely economic injury compensable through lost profits.

In Jieya, we translated the actual harm of platform operations into facts cognizable under federal injunction law. The court found that the customer attrition, damage to market position, and related business harm the plaintiff faced constituted irreparable harm, and issued the TRO without requiring the plaintiff to post security.

VII. Reverse TRO Practice Remains Developing

Yiwu Jieya v. Xu has drawn comparatively wide public attention, but it was not our first use of "DJ action plus reverse TRO."

Before Jieya, we had obtained reverse TRO and PI relief in other matters in the Northern District of Illinois and the Western District of Washington, restoring listings for cross-border sellers.

Those cases gradually confirmed for us that the function of a DJ action extends well beyond obtaining a final judgment of non-infringement or invalidity.

In the platform IP complaint setting, a DJ action can convert an operational restriction triggered by a platform complaint into an intellectual property dispute a federal court can review — and can carry emergency judicial relief before the harm compounds further.

That said, past successes do not mean the reverse TRO has become a mature, stable, or low-threshold remedy. In practice, courts remain highly cautious about such applications.

On one hand, a reverse TRO asks a court to restrain a rights holder's platform complaints early in a case, when the patent is presumed valid. Courts must avoid prematurely restricting legitimate enforcement before the facts are developed, and must handle carefully the boundary between judicial process and private platform governance.

On the other, a reverse TRO typically implicates federal jurisdiction, service, security, the scope of the injunction, the adequacy of the platform process, and whether the irreparable harm is specific and continuing. A deficiency in any one of these can defeat the application.

The "either the patent is invalid or the product does not infringe" structure in Jieya significantly narrows the room for a rights holder to manufacture a dispute. But not every patent, product, and set of prior art will support so closed a dilemma.

Without that particular factual foundation, an applicant will generally have to argue invalidity and non-infringement separately, while the rights holder can contest claim construction, the applicability of the prior art, the product comparison, the authenticity of the evidence, or its legal effect. If the court concludes that these issues require further development, a reverse TRO will be difficult to obtain early in the case.

The reverse TRO has therefore demonstrated real value as a remedy, but its boundaries, methods of proof, and standards of review await further development through additional cases.

Jieya offers one workable argumentative structure. It is not a formula for general replication.

VIII. Conclusion: From Asking a Platform to Believe You, to Requiring a Rights Holder to Prove It in Court

Platform intellectual property complaints have long involved a structural asymmetry.

A complainant generally need only submit its rights information and an allegation of infringement; the seller must repeatedly prove a negative. Even where the seller submits an attorney opinion, a technical analysis, or a filed DJ complaint, whether the listing is restored may still depend on whether the platform or the complainant accepts those materials.

A reverse TRO changes where the dispute takes place.

The seller is no longer merely asking a platform to accept its non-infringement report; it places the questions of validity, the basis for infringement, and whether the takedown should continue before a federal court.

The significance of "DJ action plus reverse TRO" lies in changing who drives the dispute, the forum in which the patent owner's infringement and validity positions are examined, and whether a seller can ask a court to intervene immediately as business harm continues to grow.

It does not eliminate intellectual property disputes, nor does it make federal courts a substitute for platform handling of every complaint.

Yiwu Jieya v. Xu remains pending.

We are grateful for the attention and recognition the matter has received from colleagues, and we look forward to further cases developing the doctrinal boundaries of the reverse TRO, so that cross-border sellers facing inadequately supported intellectual property complaints have a more mature and effective path to judicial relief.

Case Information

• Case name: Yiwu Jieya E-Commerce Co. Ltd. v. Liang Xu et al.
• Case No.: 2:25-cv-01595-LK
• Court: United States District Court for the Western District of Washington
• Counsel for plaintiff: LawMay P.C.

This article addresses a public case and general legal questions only and does not constitute legal advice on any specific matter. Outcomes depend on the specific facts, evidence, applicable law, and the court's discretion. Past results do not guarantee or predict similar outcomes in future matters.