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Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

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Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#191

Post by freeopinion »

bix6 wrote: post #169
carefree-bob wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc." How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return…

Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane.

Delivery time is super important--50% of the time. Maybe less than 50%. I never pay for express shipping on personal orders. One or two days is never worth $3 cost to me. Let alone a $12-20 charge.

I suspect super fast delivery is only a differentiator when all else is equal. At $6+/gal diesel, I'll take the cheaper item delivered by bicycle in a week. (A bit of a joke, but you get the point.)

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#192

Post by matheusmoreira »

ndriscoll wrote: post #176
cobbzilla wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for the company/account placing DD orders via CLI, instant ban hammer. you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected

I'm saying the client can take the action, but the user never sees the client because they interact with it through e.g. their AdBuster box, a glorified PiKVM that interacts with client, OCRs it, and produces simple filtered HTML for the user. As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There…

> As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard".

This is awesome!!

The local AI revolution is going to be glorious. It's no wonder they want to regulate this shit.

I can't wait until uBlock Origin integrates AI support.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#193

Post by dawnerd »

gz5 wrote: post #16

Can'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.

I just don't think that'll ever happen. The amount of people that will blindly have a machine buy something for them is very, very slim. Amazon has been trying to do auto orders for a looong time now and it's hardly taken off. It'll be a goldmine for scammers which will end up killing consumer trust very quickly. The only way to really have a "headless amazon" is have a hand curated list of approved merchants, which... you're basically back to just having amazon in the mix.

I think Amazon should be more worried about simple price comparison and tracking. They fought really hard against having to show the 90 day low and have gone out of their way to still rig it.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#194

Post by freeopinion »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #161
petilon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) become…

If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.

Amazon cannot even sort by price. An AI that gives me a list of Amazon products sorted by price will instantly replace Amazon for me.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#195

Post by Buttons840 »

petilon wrote: post #145
gz5 wrote: post #16

Can'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.

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) become…

What about the end game where my own computer running my own code controls the experience? There's a 10 trillion dollar incentive to never allow that reality.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#196

Post by jerf »

bitpush wrote: post #72
hightrix wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access, yes. Display the content delivered from amazon.com, no absolutely not.

I'm trying to make sense of this and the best analogy I can find is using an example of physical products. 1. I can walk into Apple Store and buy Apple device (this is similar to me opening the browser and accessing amazon.com 2. If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf) The core question is does Apple (Amazon in this case) can block the hired help…

The precedent on this matter is surprisingly thin on the ground, but the legal system has declined to agree with "their store, their rules" for web sites, with a particularly interesting precedent on that matter from "Sandvig v. Barr, 451 F. Supp. 3d 1 (D.D.C. 2020)" where the District of Columbia in 2020 said "Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature. Such an arrangement, wherein each website's terms of service “is a law unto itself,” would raise serious problems. This concern, then, supports a narrow interpretation of the CFAA." https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/1797-tlc-casebook/resourc... (paragraph 66)

But all we have is that and a couple of rulings from the Ninth Circuit, one of which is the HN link. For something this critical I'm surprised. I remember writing about this in 2001 or so and you'd think for something so consequential we'd have more lawsuits to point at by now. One wonders how many companies have considered it, looked at the thin precedents we have, and realized that while the victory would be slightly advantageous writing a loss into precedent would be completely devestating and declined to roll the dice.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#197

Post by tzs »

It wasn't clear to me if Comet is doing something that was purposefully built in or trained in to let it do things on Amazon, or if it was built/trained to try to do things on any website.

From what the net tells me it is the latter. There is no special "work with Amazon" stuff.

If that's true I expect will lose when the actual trial takes place and when that is appealed. (The decision today is just about a preliminary injunction before they get to actually trying to decide the outcome of the case).

I expect the reasoning will be similar to that used in copyright cases when the question was if the user is the sole infringer or the tool maker can also be liable. There it came down to whether the tool has substantial non-infringing uses.

I'm sure Perplexity will have trouble showing that there are a large number of website owners that don't mind Comet helping people on those sites so unless something was specifically built into Comet for Amazon I expect that will be good enough.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#198

Post by Zambyte »

shermantanktop wrote: post #175
Zambyte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> robots.txt is a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time I doubt anyone edits robots.txt with a warm fuzzy feeling about how much they are helping crawlers be efficient.

Well that's what they're doing.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#199

Post by gmerc »

petilon wrote: post #145
gz5 wrote: post #16

Can'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.

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference. You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) become…

It was legal when amazon did it to everyone else

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#200

Post by bix6 »

freeopinion wrote: post #191
bix6 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane.

Delivery time is super important--50% of the time. Maybe less than 50%. I never pay for express shipping on personal orders. One or two days is never worth $3 cost to me. Let alone a $12-20 charge. I suspect super fast delivery is only a differentiator when all else is equal. At $6+/gal diesel, I'll take the cheaper item delivered by bicycle in a week. (A bit of a joke, but you get the point.)

I ordered something the other day from another website and it was $9 cheapest shipping option and took 5 days. When all Prime is 1-2 day “free” delivery for me, that’s hard to beat.
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