Watchdogs To Court: Lift Order Banning Perplexity From Amazon

Siding with artificial intelligence (AI) company
Perplexity, digital rights watchdogs are asking an appellate court to lift an injunction banning the company’s shopping agent, Comet, from Amazon.

U.S. District Court Judge
Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California handed down the injunction in March, after finding that Amazon was likely to prove that Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — a
1986 anti-hacking law — by accessing Amazon users’ accounts with those users’ permission, but without Amazon’s authorization.

Perplexity is appealing that ruling. Last month,
the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily stayed the injunction while it considers the appeal.

On Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and other groups
argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that Chesney’s interpretation of the anti-hacking law is “antithetical to foundational principles of the open internet.”

“The stakes of
this dispute go far beyond a skirmish between two commercial services,” the watchdogs write, elaborating that the dispute centers on whether the anti-hacking law “gives private companies like Amazon
veto power over how the public accesses and engages with publicly available information on their websites.”

“Open access is a hallmark of today’s internet,” the groups
write. “Developers like Perplexity facilitate that access by creating tools that enable users to meaningfully engage with the web.”

The battle between Amazon and…