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

law.justia.com

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

#61

Post by warkdarrior »

dylan604 wrote: post #33
LPisGood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.

Might be the only way to reign in the AI bots. By accessing my site with a bot, you agree to reimburse me for that data at the rate of $1,000,000 per character retrieved. Please contact licensing@domain to get set up with payment and access keys

And by linking to your site from other websites, by not requiring authenticated human-only login, and by not blocking traffic from all referrers, you agree to allow my bot to access you site at zero cost.

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

#63

Post by hightrix »

advisedwang wrote: post #42
eigencoder wrote: post #28

I'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.

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

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

#64

Post by MBCook »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #29

It's just a harassment lawsuit. Amazon is going to lose, but they hope they could bully another company into what they want from them.

I read a post on Mastodon today about how Microsoft treated GPL things after Balmer was out and they were doing the “we love Linux” stuff.

The point that matters here is the law doesn’t really matter if you can outspend your opponent by six orders of magnitude. Chances are most people won’t even try.

So I agree. This is fully to prevent anyone from wanting to try.

(The point of the post was hell hard Microsoft was working to be seen as a good citizen even though they could outspend on lawyers)

https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117270213574377193

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

#65

Post by hbcdbff »

eigencoder wrote: post #47
hbcdbff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s quite clearly not the same

Really, what do you find different about it?

Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site.

It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.

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

#66

Post by delichon »

Legend2440 wrote: post #14

TL;DR Amazon is mad that Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user. Amazon argues this is against the CFAA because they do not authorize such use. They sued and got a preliminary injection. Perplexity appealed and got the injunction thrown out. The case hasn't actually been to trial on the merits yet and is still undecided.

> Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user.

Grok Bots can do the same.

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

#67

Post by dcrazy »

eigencoder wrote: post #58
advisedwang wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.

What do you mean?

Amazon is a party to interactions with their website. That gives them standing to sue over those interactions. Whether they can sue Perplexity specifically is what was being debated in these motions.

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

#69

Post by krashidov »

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.

Couldn't they just inject Ads into title content if they see headless access? Headless access is kind of inevitable at this point

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

#70

Post by Max-q »

hbcdbff wrote: post #65
eigencoder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, what do you find different about it?

Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site. It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.

What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
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