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Small business owners say Amazon is selling their products without permission
(www.newschannel5.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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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.
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 $1 because the judge would find that you have not suffered any monetary damages. You got paid for the item, after all, and "building a relationship with your customers" has no quantifiable and measurable value which can be proven in court, so judges default to one dollar.
There is also the aspect of whether an AI agent has the legal capacity to contract on behalf of Amazon or the buyer, and on whose behalf they contract if they do. I'm not aware of any American cases which have held that AI agents are "agents" (an entity with the legal power to act on behalf of another) within the meaning given to that word under the law of agency. The Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia, Canada, ruled in Moffat v. Air Canada that AI chatbots can bind the organisation who uses them and makes them available to customers. This opinion is not binding precedent, but I think courts worldwide should use it as a template for AI agency powers. If the AI has no power to contract, then the sale is void in its entirety.
I believe Amazon would argue three points:
With utm tags in weekly news letters etc. you can pretty easily calculate traffic coming to your site and conversion rates of how many people make purchases after clicking links.
And even without utm tags you can show spikes in purchases and traffic after sending emails.
It would be easy to show data: This many people go to my site This % of those people subscribe to my mailing list. This many % of people buy after receiving the email. Average purchase is xx$.
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
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.
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.