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.
Not all of us have the same bathroom fetish as Bezos.
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.
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.
There is entire categories of products whose entire intent is to circumvent some other products limitation or rules.
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.
Or imagine, showing you short movie clips (call it trailers) before they show you the movie you paid to watch?
For movies, there’s a good reason I and many others don’t go to the theater anymore.
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.
I feel like this is already ceding too much ground. A better analogy is "can I hire someone to read this product catalog I got in the mail for me." My browser isn't Amazon's store, it's a device for reading catalogs they send me.
1- Amazon owns servers and serves the client-interface ot interact with their servers. 2- They make public their Terms of Service and they make users (with accounts) agree to them. 3- The terms include a (very standard) "you can only use our service through the interface you provide, you may not automate this interface" clause. 4- Users violate this clause when they use an agent and browser-use. 5- Perplexity provided browser-use features that were used, by design, for users to break this clause.
From those facts, as shown to you, do you think Amazon doesn't have a case?
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.
It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not using Codex to steer a headless browser