| ▲ | eigencoder 3 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | jubilanti 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | advisedwang 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser. |
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| ▲ | hightrix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Access, yes. Display the content delivered from amazon.com, no absolutely not. | | |
| ▲ | bitpush 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 (Comet browser) from accessing the store. Most reasonable people would say "their store, their rules", so that goes to mean Amazon's website, Amazon's rules. | | |
| ▲ | A1kmm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through? In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me. | | |
| ▲ | hatthew 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose? |
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| ▲ | hightrix 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store. Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you. | | |
| ▲ | bitpush 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | What if you had to sit through a presentation of their cool products before you can see the product? Or imagine, showing you short movie clips (call it trailers) before they show you the movie you paid to watch? |
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| ▲ | eigencoder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What do you mean? | | |
| ▲ | dcrazy 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | eigencoder 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think I get it. Like they'd have standing to sue if I tried to hack their website, or change the price of items or something. |
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| ▲ | 40four 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your feeling turned it to be correct. Amazon lost the case in the appellate court. |
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| ▲ | semiquaver an hour ago | parent [-] | | But not on standing grounds. And no, Amazon did not lose the “case”, which usually means “the whole lawsuit”. The current posture is still at the preliminary injunction stage. Amazon was granted a PI by district court (basically “perplexity, stop this now while litigation is ongoing”) and the appeals court overturned. Now the actual case can proceed at the district level. |
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| ▲ | hbcdbff 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It’s quite clearly not the same |
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| ▲ | eigencoder 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Really, what do you find different about it? | | |
| ▲ | hbcdbff 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program. They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer. The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here. | |
| ▲ | eigencoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same. When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content. An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content. I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different. | |
| ▲ | artdigital 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns It’s not using Codex to steer a headless browser | |
| ▲ | Max-q 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop? "When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers." | | |
| ▲ | eigencoder 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Obviously all browsers rely on direction from the user. But they also typically rely on instructions from the browser maker's servers. Traditionally, you get all of those instructions in a single download that's been pre-packaged (the browser program itself). But if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers? As a consumer, I don't think it's very prudent to trust a company with that kind of access to your data, but it doesn't seem materially different from the kind of trust you have to give to Chrome. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers? It's not longer my agent. It's a joint agent of my self and whoever else is giving it instructions. (This is Amazon's argument.) Also, Amazon told Perplexity to fuck off. If your assistant is told to stop doing something in a cease and desist, and then keeps doing it, the fact that you asked them to do it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. My guess is we'll find a balance where local models can act as user agents while corporate ones have to meet certain requirements to gain that safe harbour. |
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| ▲ | ndnddmnf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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