Report from MediaPost
In Brief – A federal district court injunction barring Perplexity’s AI shopping agent, Comet, from accessing Amazon has been overturned by an appeals panel of the US Ninth District that found it was unlikely that the AI company would be found to have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a federal anti-hacking law. Circuit Judge Milan Smith, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, concluded that Perplexity itself did not “access” Amazon, but rather that Amazon users accessed the platform through their own computers, with Comet assisting them. The dispute began last November, when Amazon accused Comet of shopping and making purchases for users despite technological blocks and a cease-and-desist demand. District Judge Maxine Chesney eventually barred Comet from Amazon and ordered Perplexity to destroy data it obtained. The appellate panel said imposing CFAA liability would require a novel and expansive interpretation of the law and would “impair consumer choice and needlessly limit development of a nascent technology.” Amazon is appealing the ruling.
Context – Web scraping, which plays a central role in AI development and services, and is governed by a patchwork of state and federal laws and inconsistent court rulings, is now the subject of a host of AI-related lawsuits. Perplexity, the self-described Generative AI (GAI) “answer engine” startup, is the target of several. While Amazon’s lawsuit alleges violations to the decades-old CFAA, a Reddit lawsuit alleges that Perplexity violates the decades-old Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA). Reddit argues that Perplexity engages in “industrial scale” evasion of Google’s access controls to scrape Reddit content off that platform and display it on Perplexity. Similar DMCA lawsuits have followed against Nvidia, Snap, Meta and others. Reddit has also sued Anthropic over massive AI-related scraping, bringing state-law and contract claims. While Reddit’s Anthropic suit was initially transferred to federal court as the appropriate venue for copyright law cases, it is now back in California state court to deal with allegations besides federal copyright law violations.