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Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

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Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#51

Post by Lazare »

lenkite wrote: post #40
Lazare wrote: post #13

Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…

> Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you. Why not apply your exact "its fine" standards to Amazon too ? Standards go BOTH ways, after all. > In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find…

I mean, I'm inclined to think Amazon was wrong over the Comet browser thing too, so...

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#52

Post by Lazare »

saghm wrote: post #44
Lazare wrote: post #13

Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…

"Fundamentally fine"? How do you think Amazon would react to someone scraping their marketplace and posting the inventory under their own service? Unless the answer is "they'd be perfectly happy to have to opt out individually in each case", that's a double standard. The only reason they wouldn't actually need to care about this is because they have comparatively inexhaustive resources to be able to shut this sort of…

As someone else noted, Amazon sent a cease and desist letter when someone tried more-or-less the same thing on them (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-perplex...), so it's absolutely a double standard, yes.

But that doesn't answer the question of what rights vendors actually have here (much less what rights they should have).

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#53

Post by userbinator »

What a bunch of BS. Once I buy a product I can resell it elsewhere. That's how ownership works. I do not need "permission" for this, beyond that guaranteed by the legal system, and exceptions such as export restrictions notwithstanding. There is a term for this that currently eludes me (first sale doctrine is a similar concept but not exactly.)

If I was a seller, I'd probably find this a good thing --- Amazon is effectively giving me more customers for free.

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#54

Post by userbinator »

saghm wrote: post #44
Lazare wrote: post #13

Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…

"Fundamentally fine"? How do you think Amazon would react to someone scraping their marketplace and posting the inventory under their own service? Unless the answer is "they'd be perfectly happy to have to opt out individually in each case", that's a double standard. The only reason they wouldn't actually need to care about this is because they have comparatively inexhaustive resources to be able to shut this sort of…

I have bought items from AliExpress which somehow arrived from an Amazon warehouse, unexpectedly quickly. The price was right and I have no other complaints, so I think it does happen.

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#55

Post by ericd »

Lazare wrote: post #51
lenkite wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you. Why not apply your exact "its fine" standards to Amazon too ? Standards go BOTH ways, after all. > In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find…

I mean, I'm inclined to think Amazon was wrong over the Comet browser thing too, so...

Yeah, seems like there’s a big fight brewing over losing the status quo of having control of how humans interact with stuff, as agents come along and make it so we don’t need to wind our way through the digital ad mazes they’ve constructed to do things.

But the incumbents who don’t want to allow this seem destined to lose, this is a tsunami coming, where this is just obviously how things will be done in the future once performance is good enough, and any group who tries to force customers into the old way is just not going to succeed for one reason or another. This is just how the market is shifting.

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#56

Post by dpark »

niemandhier wrote: post #50
dpark wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t worry. If Amazon decided to undercut by selling at a loss, they would absolutely put it in their ToS that retailers cannot exploit this loophole and they would sue to enforce their ToS.

Retailers could put into their TOS that they are exempt from those clauses when buying things bought from them.

I like this. “By purchasing from us you agree that you cannot enforce your ridiculous terms of service and if you try, you also owe us a pony.”

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#57

Post by ehhthing »

kayson wrote: post #32

Wouldn't this be violating copyrights left and right? Presumably most of these listings have pictures and I'd be surprised if Amazon were asking permission to reproduce them. Would the same apply to item descriptions...?

Search engines would have been violating copyright for the last 20 years.

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#58

Post by userbinator »

internet101010 wrote: post #12

Most manufacturers have restrictions on where retailers can sell their product for exactly this reason. The fact that Amazon is doing this is just going to result in a lot of unnecessary billable hours. Another reason they do not allow it is because if something is popular Amazon will make their own private label version. Completely irresponsible behavior.

Those are only in the case of specific contracts, but Amazon did not enter into any contract with the manufacturers.

Seling something you bought is completely legal and perfectly normal.

Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission

#59

Post by bramblerose »

otterley wrote: post #45
kayson wrote: post #32

Wouldn't this be violating copyrights left and right? Presumably most of these listings have pictures and I'd be surprised if Amazon were asking permission to reproduce them. Would the same apply to item descriptions...?

No. The producer of a good has no copyright in images made of that good by someone else. Ordinarily, the photographer holds the copyright to an image, unless it was a work for hire. So if I buy a thing, take a photo of it, then use my photo to accompany a listing for that thing, the manufacturer of that thing has no recourse in copyright law.

Unless the design of the object is copyrightable (which it often is!) in which case the photo is a derivative work.
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