All right, which one of you is going to go through the trouble of explaining what this is about?
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Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
21–30 of 195 posts
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
First para really does the job: "Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of [blah]. Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s…
no, it does not, you have to actually RTFA if you are going to try to TLDR a court proceeding. literally 3 paras down: > the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction and remanded for further proceedings. The Ninth Circuit held that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its claims because Perplexity did not “access” Amazon’s computers within the meaning of the C…
The first paragraph is enough for context.
The real case is in the future. The appeal was just for the injunction.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#23[flagged]
It should be noted that suing gun manufacturers for murder has been done successfully. A more charitable comparison might be suing a torrent aggregator instead of the end users doing the distribution.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#24[deleted]
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#25Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#26Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?
Anyone can sue anybody. HF for sure was in a strong position after what happened. OAI gave them a lot of GPT credits under a sort of partnership agreement to mollify them.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#27TLDR: Perplexity agents allegedly ignored Amazon's robots.txt
robots.txt is a suggestion, not a rule. It's a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time. Using robots.txt as a security measure is like trying to stop a foreign invader with a "road closed" sign.
Edit: this is obviously assuming they literally meant robots.txt, but from a qyick skim of the site, it doesn't look like that was mentioned at least. I guess you meant it metaphorically :P
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#28I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#29It's just a harassment lawsuit. Amazon is going to lose, but they hope they could bully another company into what they want from them.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#30Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?
I'd put my money on "yes," here. Of course, OAI can pay them off. But you know it had to happen to more than HuggingFace, and so somebody's going to try it.