Remembering years ago when we lost $5MM of Bezo's money...
Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
41–50 of 179 posts
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#42I'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.
Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#43Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?
They absolutely could. There's a decent claim for OAI being reckless or at least negligent. The limiting thing, in my mind, is the need to show harm. How much did OAI's recklessness hurt HuggingFace? There's some dev hours devoted to the cleanup but it's not like it devastated their business. Their legal team is probably a lot more focused on the Nvidia acquisition instead.
Would there also not be some reputational damages that could be compensated for as well? These are the types of cases usually ending in a settlement for non-disclosed amounts with NDAs attached.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#44I'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.
It’s quite clearly not the same
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#45> 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 the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, na…
Isn't this how every agent works these days? Apple and Google are working on tool calling for apps, but that's still going to be backstopped by screen scraping for years very likely.
It's a good bet that everybody's got equivalent CFAA boilerplate in their terms, so I guess all agentic automations are crimes now.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#46I'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.
You're not using "standing" correctly, you're using it more to argue about the merits of the case. Standing is about filtering out frivolous lawsuits. One has "standing" to file a lawsuit when there is reason to believe these three questions could be answered in the affirmative, if a trial were to take place: Was the plaintiff harmed? Did the defendant cause that harm? Can the court rectify that harm?
It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#47I'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.
It’s quite clearly not the same
Really, what do you find different about it?
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#48i was building an agent, local llm, that would access my browser and do whatever I tell it to do.
it's an extension of browser use cases, not a crime
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#49Earlier 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…
This could get pretty pedantic. They haven’t “won” yet, and the first few paragraphs do accurately describe the problem, but not the whole state of the case. The injunctions and appeals are very important, but they are details of the suit proceedings, not the case itself.
Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
#50Funny that they aren’t targeting OpenAI and Anthropic’s computer use agents, which can do the exact same thing, and probably do it at a much larger scale given their userbases. The difference of course is that both OpenAI and Anthropic are hosted on AWS Bedrock, and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.