“I typed in YamzWorld into the Amazon app and lo and behold there were all my products there with my pictures from my website as well,” Montes-Tarazas said.
While he receives payment for sales, Montes-Tarazas said the arrangement strips away his ability to build direct customer relationships.
“I do get the sale and I do get the money, but customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for,” Montes-Tarazas said.
Could he not put terms of use on his website prohibiting the use by AI agents, and sue Amazon if they don’t comply?
Filing a suit against Amazon… which attorney is going to take that case, and how much money would you need to pay them? 😕
Some lawyers would be very happy to go up against big tech since they have so much money that it’s often cheaper for them to just buy the problem away
Exactly. A bunch of lawyers work on contingency.
It’s not like every lawyer in the world is quaking in their boots at the mere thought of going up against Amazon.
There are about 1.3 million attorneys in the United States in 2026. Find a cross section between that and “consequences? Fuck it” and that’s your group.
There’s likely plenty of people who will happily make good trouble fighting Amazon.
Also, people know people. I myself have a friend of a friend with incredibly powerful legal weight that wants to take a swing at my employer. They are waiting for them to cross a line and then I just need to agree to let them go nuts.
That situation is NOT rare. And powerful people know this. So they paint this picture of them being indestructible. But it’s a lie.
What happens if Amazon just stops existing one day?
Literally nothing. They are buried into all e-commerce like a fucking tick. They pretty much own the cloud, even if Google and Microsoft tell you otherwise. But everything they’ve done is already done. The blueprint is out there. The rough edges sanded down. There are no questions, which means recreating such a thing is much less risky and expensive now than it used to be.
And Amazon knows this.
That’s not necessarily how it works. If Amazon is guilty, they’ll settle for an easy win
Depends though. If they think they’re guilty but that it’ll be impractical to prove it if they delay the case in court for one to two business centuries, they’ll do it
Weird clauses in terms of use are frequently just toilet paper when it actually comes down to enforcing them in court. You can “sue” but you might just win $1 because the judge would find that you have not suffered any monetary damages. You got paid for the item, after all, and “building a relationship with your customers” has no quantifiable and measurable value which can be proven in court, so judges default to one dollar.
There is also the aspect of whether an AI agent has the legal capacity to contract on behalf of Amazon or the buyer, and on whose behalf they contract if they do. I’m not aware of any American cases which have held that AI agents are “agents” (an entity with the legal power to act on behalf of another) within the meaning given to that word under the law of agency. The Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia, Canada, ruled in Moffat v. Air Canada that AI chatbots can bind the organisation who uses them and makes them available to customers. This opinion is not binding precedent, but I think courts worldwide should use it as a template for AI agency powers. If the AI has no power to contract, then the sale is void in its entirety.
I believe Amazon would argue three points:
Isn’t this just like Doordash though? I’m not sure how these were resolved though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoorDash#Litigation_for_illegal_unauthorized_restaurant_listing
That’s a different thing. In that case, Doordash actually blocked people from ordering from the restaurant in question and redirected them elsewhere. Had the restaurant been listed without its permission and all it did was cause a Doordash employee to appear at the restaurant, place an order on the users behalf, then go deliver it, it would be a similar case to this one.
I doubt many restaurants would have a problem with Doordash listing them without their permission if all that happened when someone placed an order, is that they get a call from Doordash (automated or not) to place a to-go order, and then someone picks it up later and pays for it.
Restaurants absolutely did and do have a problem with that, and I question the authority with which you state that there are no appreciable monetary damages from amazon denying a small business additional sales opportunities.
https://www.cpr.org/2021/05/19/restaurants-are-fed-up-with-grubhub-doordash-and-others-now-theyve-got-legislators-on-their-side/
If you think you can find a way to quantify damages in a legally sufficient way then go ahead.
With utm tags in weekly news letters etc. you can pretty easily calculate traffic coming to your site and conversion rates of how many people make purchases after clicking links.
And even without utm tags you can show spikes in purchases and traffic after sending emails.
It would be easy to show data: This many people go to my site This % of those people subscribe to my mailing list. This many % of people buy after receiving the email. Average purchase is xx$.
This many people never went to my site because amazon.
Can you prove that these people would have visited your site had Amazon not intervened?
Jeff called, he said your next to be laid off
Can Amazon prove they would not have? Its their burden to show that.
No, the burden of proof is on the claimant. If you sue Amazon, you have to prove your claims to a perponderance of the evidence.
And the i already told you how to calculate how much traffic and sales you have lost. (The original thing what you claimed to be impossible to calculate) If amazon would choose they could respond with that argument. Looking back at most larger piracy law cases nobody has been able to defend them selfs “those guys would not have bought the movie if we would not had let them torrent it”
Copyright infringement is not suitable as an analogous case because the law specifies statutory damages for it, so proving damages is not typically necessary for the types of works which you are thinking of.
Let me give a detailed analysis with some concrete, but arbitrarily-chosen numbers, and then I’ll show you what a lawyer representing Amazon would say to attack the argument you’ve presented.
Suppose you notice that 5 per cent of people whom you ask to subscribe to your mailing list actually subscribe (it is almost certain a real number would be much lower). Then, of those who subscribe to your mailing list, 10 per cent of them make a purchase when you send an advertisement to them through that mailing list. And then, of those who make a purchase, the average sale is $50, of which $20 is profit. Therefore, you argue damages of 5% × 10% × $20 = $0.10 per customer. Suppose Amazon placed 1,000 orders this way. You therefore plead damages of $100 (the fact that this is a trivial amount is not relevant to the legal analysis).
The legal method for the calculation of damages is to compare what your financial situation would have been had Amazon not done the thing they were not supposed to. Amazon will argue that had they complied with your terms of service, 0 orders would have been placed as you forbade AI agents from placing orders, and therefore the profit can be calculated as 5% × 10% × $20 × 0 = $0. After this argument is made, it then becomes your burden as the claimant to rebut it. You will have to prove what percentage of people ordered through Amazon, who would have otherwise ordered from you directly (and thus you would have the opportunity to advertise to). This is a fundamentally very difficult task. Amazon would probably propose to the court that you ask all of the customers to testify that they would have otherwise ordered from you directly, and then you can count it as ten cents per witness.
All of that notwithstanding, Amazon will still argue your damages are zero, because you have not actually lost the ability to connect with the customers they have given you, because you still have the ability to ask them to subscribe to your mailing list by including a card to that effect in the package you send them. The fact that both of us very well know that nobody will do that is not legally relevant: the action is possible and the law does not particularly care about whether it is easy or effective.
I know it’s tempting to call me a bootlicker or whatever, but the fact of the matter really is that the law is not favourable to the claimant in this case. This is just a bad argument to make with no sufficient legal justification to claim anything more than a nominal amount of damages. Yes, Amazon are a bunch of assholes, but sometimes, being an asshole really is legal. The law is not a proxy for morality and the courts are not infallible guardians of justice. They are institutions that interpret fallible, imperfect, human-made rules.
Havent call you a bootlicker nor i intent to.
Also subscriber amount changes a lot depending the product and the way you build it. At one point i worked in a company who got over 80% of people buying from them to subscribe to mailing list and average unsubscribe per email was under 2%.
Another point that can skew the numbers a lot is the products them self. Are you selling single high price products or multiple different knick knacks. Also you can calculate that this percentage of your customers add additional products to their shopping cart when they are in your enviroment. If you have enough movement in the site you can use the law of big numbers to calculate excatly how much revenue you have lost. At that point its not “potential revenue” but number based fact.
And you have lost the ability to connect with the customer. As the ai agent is the one making the purchase you dont get any data from the customer and you cant ask for the marketing permissions to reach them with. So its impossible to make personalised ads and you have no way to contact the customer after the first delivery. Again, these are things you can calculate.
About the legality of using bots or ai agents. Thats something legistlation has not been able to keep up, and what you said about them not breaking tos etc is right, but i want to specify that this discussion started and still is about is it possible to put price on “building a relationship with a customer” and it most definedly is. Any company that is even somewhat professional will know the average CLV of their audience and most companies can show how their activation actions effect that.
Edit;
As a after tought. You could ask during the discovery what times the AI agent has been showing your products in the inventory and compare those times with your average traffic on your site and point out any possible irregulaties.
Interesting! I can’t imagine Amazon would want to argue #2, though, since it seems like that would completely undercut their ability to use AI agents in this way.
I hadn’t really thought about the implications of the ability of an AI agent to contract, though. That seems like really murky (and intriguing) territory; whether they can or cant, either way would have a lot of interesting implications.
It is a conditional argument. It is vacuous if the court rules that the AI is an agent that can bind a principal. If and only if the court rules that the AI agent can’t contract on behalf of a principal (for the purchase of goods or otherwise), then Amazon should get a refund.