I criticized Amazon’s policies in a blog – their lawyers have subpoenaed me | Hacker News Reader

I criticized Amazon’s policies in a blog – their lawyers have subpoenaed me

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922 pointsgraeme222 comments

NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is for informational and entertainment purposes only

Everyone seems to be conflating the California AG requests with Amazons.

I parsed more closely about what the ask here is, and its that Amazon is asking via separate motions for the same information given to the AG case which, due to how discovery works, they should already have, this to me reads as an attempt to press Molson legally and thus spend time and money on complying with these requests.

They're also asking for additional information above what the CA AG office asked for or may have considered immaterial to their case. Its a fishing exercise to see if they can find anything to discredit Molson as a witness.

Due to the wording in the thread, I found it confusing, but I read some of the posted pics of the asks, and its clear that Amazon is not only re-asking for what the CA AG office asked for, but also additional information. The wording makes it seem like only the AG office is asking for information.

EDIT: Also, i see some folks think this is a situation where someone is being sued. Nowhere does it say Molson is being sued, Molson is essentially alleging that this is an overreach of discovery[0] via being "buried" by it. Molson has apparently confused a subpoena with a lawsuit however

EDIT 2: I think Molson is conflating a few things (such as lawsuit vs subpoena) and I can't say I blame anyone, the legal system is complex and it can be really hard to remember these things under pressure. Its important to look at the posted documents more than anything, Molson was subpoenaed to provide discovery and I think Molson may have conflated that with a "lawsuit"

EDIT 3: Given this is Twitter, he may have meant something like being served in a lawsuit or meant subpoena and not lawsuit without realizing and can't edit the tweets. I still think we can give Molson the benefit of the doubt here

[0]: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/code-of-civil-procedure/ccp-sec...

If there isn't a lawsuit or a criminal case, how is there discovery?

There's a civil lawsuit involving the State of California and Amazon. When you have a civil case, you can get discovery from third parties using subpoenas, which seems to be what's happening here.

I think the point being made is that the lawsuit or criminal case is not against him, even if he seems to be tangled up in a case to some degree.

NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Whats happening here is Molson a expert witness to a lawsuit filed against Amazon by the CA Attorney General Office. They've issued a subpoena for information (as is their right under the legal system) for additional discovery. A good chunk of it appears to be a repeat of the same discovery the state AG office is or has gathered, but they're also looking for anything related even tangentially to Molson's relationship with Amazon (emails, messages etc) as well. The allegation here would more closely be that Amazon is trying to abuse the discovery process by overreach.

I'm willing to give Molson the benefit of the doubt in saying "lawsuit" when likely its subpoena. I imagine this is a stressful time for Molson and it can be hard to get the nuances of the legal system portrayed right. The docs he posted make it all much more clear

As a lawyer, none of those requests are overreach. It would be malpractice to not make them.

I'm not a lawyer and would never give legal advice.

I'm not making judgement as to what is or isn't, simply am trying to clarify what he's getting at. I imagine to Molson this feels like Amazon is trying to bury them in discovery

You're not clarifying. You're speculating.

Now you are speculating. The poster could be the same person who made the tweets

Part of the complaint being made by Molsen is that even after two days of deposition, he's being asked to return for more, for is critique in a blog post. Is that considered normal in a case like this? If it is normal, are there some protections to keep a witness from continuously being deposed to the point that it is abuse, or is that something that one side would take up with the judge?

I'm not a lawyer, but i've been an expert witness in a few cases. Usually if you're coming back it's because they felt something was left out or they found new information elsewhere and want to ask questions around it. Usually though a second run is all about breaking you down as a witness.

I've had one time where I was called back in, it was related to new discovery that had been provided related to a security breach. It was from a third party and I had not been privy to the documents up to that point. Ultimately they had little or no bearing on the case but I did have to state I have no knowledge for a bunch of questions asked.

I think for OPs case, they're trying to find more gotchas. I would request through a lawyer to limit scope and or mitigate being harassed.

Who knows though, the amount of screwy games that lawyers play blew my mind.. until i remembered they bill hourly.

Your comment about billing hourly is extremely well taken. You’re not wrong to conclude that the billing model can contribute to overactive lawyering.

We are also trying to win (within reason) and we are often trying not to get sued or disbarred. (I guess I can’t speak for all of us, but…)

Sometimes the bills suck because of the billing model. Often the bills suck for a combination of those other reasons.

I also have noticed no one tends to shop around for the absolute least expensive lawyer for some reason. I’ll have to think more about that one…

I was probably over broad in my comment. Most of the lawyers I work with are actually reasonable and trying to solve the issue as you're implying. It's generally the larger cases / boutique firms that are pressing the numbers.

What a lot of people don't realize is that on class actions where laywers are often times lumped into one big case, most of them make peanuts if they're not the primary firms. You guys have a lot of gamble to with billing depending on your structure. So all in, I get it.

Yeah man, it’s a tough racket. Some lawyers are paid entirely on contingency. Personally I think the economics of this gig are ridiculous but I certainly don’t have a better model.

As a non-lawyer, at what point does that become abuse?

How much of my time do I have to burn for free because someone else is suing someone else, and my name came up?

It’s a lot. “Extraordinary efforts” or something like that is the test before an undue burden is met.

But like all good legal answers, the specific answer is that “it depends.”

You're saying that if a company is sued, it is legal malpractice to not target opposing witnesses with individual lawsuits?

Except for the fact that opposing witnesses are not being targeted with individual lawsuits.

Am I misunderstanding the thread?

> the state of California filed a complaint against Amazon. They cited me and made me a witness.

> And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit.

He’s misunderstanding, not you.

There's no actual evidence in this thread of Molson being served with an individual lawsuit. He appears to be subpoenaed and deposed in his capacity as a CA AG witness. Nowhere is he being sued by Amazon.

If by he you mean Molson, then you're right. He's an expert witness in the suite brought by CA against Amazon. There is no individual suite against him.

so since he's an expert witness for CA AG, can he request any kind of financial help/reimbursement from them?

Expert Witnesses are often paid eye watering sums of money

One of my professors was an expert witness on cases related to CPU cache design IP. He got paid $1000/hr. He said the opposing side would pick through every past resume he had looking for anything incorrect, and would interview his former co-workers and even neighbors I think looking for dirt on him.

Since Amazon is making the request, they pay:

Rule 26(b)(4)(E) Payment. Unless manifest injustice would result, the court must require that the party seeking discovery:

(i) pay the expert a reasonable fee for time spent in responding to discovery

Care to elaborate?

It's difficult to put any weight in an anonymous comment when it relies solely on credibility.

Generally in discovery a party is permitted to request anything ["reasonably calcu^H^H^H^H^H^H^H] "any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case."

So aything relevant to CA's claims against Amazon, or Amazon's defenses, is fair game. If your client is being sued for a Zillion dollars, and you don't dig up every possible way to discredit the plaintiff's key witnesses, you're not doing your job. This means asking about every possible connection between the plaintiff and the witness, their possible biases and gaps in credibility.

I like reading his tweets so I'm inclined to be generous, but just to be clear –he's the Chairman of an IP Enforcement firm [0], so the difference between a subpoena and a lawsuit should be elementary for him.

[0] https://www.edisonlf.com/about

Ouch. That looks really bad, either for the competence of the firm, or his intentions to make the situation more malicious than it actually were.

(When I was looking at his original tweet, when I saw "4 years" I immediately googled for California statute of limitations...)

they're also looking for anything related even tangentially to Molson's relationship with Amazon (emails, messages etc)

But Amazon should already have that information, seeing as it was party to that relationship? Can't he just answer with "go search your own archives" (or legalese to the same effect) for those things?

Not a lawyer. I imagine there's various forms of discovery and various ways it comes up. But one thing to note is that you can be victim of the pains of discovery as an innocent third party.

"Hey random vendor, backed by the full force of the Court, you are compelled to spend time and money getting us x,y,z and/or lawyer time arguing about it."

“The public has a right to every man’s evidence.”

If a party tries to abuse the discovery process against a third party then the third party can move for sanctions, including costs.

I don't follow. Aren't we saying the same thing?

Yes, there's definitely remedies if things go too far. Good luck with those, though. But the point is that you don't have to be the plaintiff or the respondent to get tied up in an expensive, time-consuming process.

I misread your post. I’ve deleted that sentence.

Unfortunately judges want evidence submitted so unless it is an impossible request, they usually allow it.

Molson says right in one of his tweets that he’s been “served with a lawsuit.” As far as I can tell, he hasn’t. He’s been served with a subpoena. Amazon has a right to subpoena evidence from third parties, and they have a right to extend their requests for evidence beyond just what has already been given to the CA AG. They have the right to look for exculpatory evidence, even if it’s more than what’s already been given by Molson. “I don’t have those documents” is an acceptable response to a subpoena, so it’s not like he has to come up with stuff he doesn’t already have. Amazon or the CA AG already having the evidence isn’t a reason to stop them from asking Molson for it.

Molson also has rights. The discovery process isn’t supposed to be used to overwhelm or harass third parties, so he should move to quash if he really is being overwhelmed. This is the reality of our system: if you’re a witness and you’ve got evidence relevant to a case then the parties (and the court) have the right to get it from you. This is especially true when someone is already involved as a witness for one side, as here. Unfortunately, being able to be roped into a lawsuit that you’re not a party to is not only possible but probable in the USA.

Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

I agree, see my note about giving Molson some room here given I imagine the stresses of this ongoing situation Molson's involved in and likely doesn't have the legal vocabulary to back anything. Whats actually telling here is the motions Molson posted pictures of in the thread, that says everything that's actually happening here. I'm not going to fault someone under stress and likely has a limited understanding of the legal system for getting the wording wrong here, I imagine it feels like a lawsuit, but yes, its actually a subpoena.

If hypothetically I was Molson I'd be rushing to hand this all over to the state AG and get resources from them for assistance, if at all possible.

It's also a tweet, so even if he wrote "lawsuit" and wanted to correct it to "subpoena" (or other legal request), would not be possible to do so.

It's interesting later on in his thread where it's clear he's not a particular critic of Amazon overall, merely this specific policy; they're turning him into an enemy either intentionally or unintentionally.

He also could have meant served in a lawsuit, which is colloquially sometimes how people refer to being subpoenaed

Does this mean you can go broke merely from being a witness? Or does Amazon have to reimburse him for his costs and time?

They don't reimburse jurors at a reasonable rate, why would witnesses be treated any better?

It's much easier to either get out of jury duty than a subpoena, or to fulfill jury duty than a subpoena.

Also, witnesses testifying pretty much have to be voluntary. Consider being a witness to a mafia murder, and being afraid for your life. Do you think the system should be able to force you to that?

Ok, I've switched the title to say subpoenaed. If there's a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

> “I don’t have those documents” is an acceptable response to a subpoena, so it’s not like he has to come up with stuff he doesn’t already have.

Speaking from experience, better be sure you word that response right, or you might accidentally give them reason to push harder/further. You need a lawyer to fight against good lawyers.

> Molson also has rights. The discovery process isn’t supposed to be used to overwhelm or harass third parties, so he should move to quash if he really is being overwhelmed

While you're right, the process of even doing this will cost you a minimum of $10k USD if you're in a wealthy area in the coastal US. Which for a corporation is nothing, you likely have in-house counsel you're already paying for that can do this legal boilerplate.

But as an individual it's terrifying and incredibly stressful.

> While you're right, the process of even doing this will cost you a minimum of $10k USD if you're in a wealthy area in the coastal US.

$1,645 in 2007 in Los Angeles, for N=1.

Business partners had a nasty fallout and one subpoenaed me, a contractor who had billed them only $1,000.

> Molson says right in one of his tweets that he’s been “served with a lawsuit.”

Do you have a reference to that tweet? Was it removed, or am I just having a hard time finding it?

"And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit."

https://twitter.com/Molson_Hart/status/1663582603906088961

> I parsed more closely about what the ask here is, and its that Amazon is asking via separate motions for the same information given to the AG case which, due to how discovery works, they should already have, this to me reads as an attempt to press Molson legally and thus spend time and money on complying with these requests.

Can't his lawyer go to the judge and have this stopped?

Note: I am not a lawyer in California and the is definitely not legal advice

A lawyer for Molson could conceivably file a Motion to Quash the Subpoena, however, he has to argue from what are generally a small range of options to deny or limit the scope of the subpoena. The most common is that the request is unduly broad and thereby is burdensome. This would usually not result in granting the quash, but could secure tightening of the scope of the subpoena. I don't know enough to even guess at the likelihood of limiting the subpoena, but the general assumption in litigation is that at least some portion of a facially relevant subpoena will be granted.

I followed up with OP on Twitter, and apparently he's pro se.

https://twitter.com/dpifke/status/1663665211914481667

Amazon filed to quash his deposition subpoena, but that was apparently because they felt that it was premature without more document production. But from the picture of the order he posted, it looks like the judge has already limited the overall scope.

A decent lawyer costs $400+ per hour. 1-2 hours for initial consult, 3-4 hours to prepare the motion and another 3-4 hours to appear before a judge. Other side delays for another hearing and add another 3-4 hours … could cost $5000+

The system is working exactly as designed.

I assume you are being sarcastic.

20 hours at $400/hour is $8k. For a business with five employees, long-term leases, etc., that's painful, but shouldn't bankrupt you.

It also really should be covered by insurance, but in my experience you want your own counsel separate from your insurer's anyways, and specialty legal insurance isn't worth the paper on which the policy is printed. Far cheaper to just apply for a business credit card (or keep the balance on your existing one low enough to cover sudden unexpected expenses like these).

He should just respond in kind and use ChatGPT to generate terrabytes of discovery documents for Amazon lawyers to go through. Overreach for overreach.

What’s the catch with this approach

They could ask the court to block the requests(I presume), if there is demonstrably an excess or errant type of requests, and the court(the judge) will remeber that.

When producing documents you're asserting they're actually real.

So if ChatGPT generates a bunch of stuff that is incriminating, you'll have some 'splaining to do. And potentially contempt of court of the like.

"Restate the following boring document in blandest possible ways, do it 1,000,000 times"

I wonder how many times it would take to have decent odds of producing a variant with ‘Amazon is innocent, it’s all a giant frame job I’m doing to them’ or similar in it.

I guess adding some post-processing classifier to check generated docs for self-incrimination would lower the odds by 2-3 magnitudes.

What’s the saying? ‘You can’t build in quality with better QA’?

Haha. You do you, I just can’t imagine any lawyer saying what you’re proposing is a good idea at all.

I mean we need to figure out an admissible way to bankrupt Amazon lawyers like they want to bankrupt us. Tit-for-tat.

Ah, but the key thing you’re missing is that the Amazon lawyers are probably being paid by the hour (at very high rates) and would love to have an excuse to pretend to work for longer.

And you’ll never succeed in bankrupting Amazon.

That's still putting a lot of trust into the AI that it's not going to overstep in some way that's problematic to you, and given the lawyers that have to sift through the content you create may not be very happy about it, they might be more than willing to jump on any excuse to cause you problems based on what you submitted.

As an example, just search about ChatGPT being "confidently wrong" or "confidently incorrect". It's also possible that in restating things ChatGPT may be "colloquially accurate" but "legally incorrect" in how it restates things, given it's trained on many sources of natural language, and I think most people would choose to communicate with a court and lawyers (especially ones they assume antagonistic) with a higher level of caution than colloquialisms as they would when speaking informally to others.

Not clear what the specifics of the order here is, but the catch is he could risk being found in contempt of court or guilty of obstruction of justice depending on the circumstances. A subpoena is a court order compelling either testimony or the production of evidence. If you then go and make up a bunch of new stuff for the purposes of frustrating that court order you could find yourself in some difficulties.

That said, there is such a thing as "malicious compliance" ie complying with an subpoena by supplying the evidence requested in as unhelpful a format as possible. One that I heard of is in a suit related to the Madoff case, Madoff was compelled to produce records of phone calls made from his company and personal phones, so provided thousands of pages of very blurry scanned image pdfs in order to make it difficult for prosecutors (and the trustees, who were working to recover the funds) to OCR them and decipher who he had called. In the end they managed to do this nontheless.

Jail for contempt tends to keep me on the straight and narrow but the again I’m trying to retain my license which may influence my thinking.

> NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is for informational and entertainment purposes only

Asking because I don't know - I see this a lot, but is it necessary? Surely we don't live in a time where a commenter on a news site is liable for their opinion, right?

Almost certainly not, but adding a one line disclaimer costs nothing and covers that one in a billion chance it turns into a headache.

IANAL (ya see what I did there?), but probably not necessary as a legal requirement. I always viewed it as “juuust in case that you think I’m a lawyer offering legal advice because I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about, I am neither a lawyer, nor do I know what I’m talking about” courtesy to the reader.

I cannot imagine getting pulled into court because I recommended someone file in small claims court for $PROBLEM, and didn’t put “IANAL”.

There's another a step above: I am a lawyer but I am not your lawyer.

No. Lawyers sometimes call out that they are not offering legal advice and/or that the reader is not to consider themselves the lawyer's client, out of what is, in most contexts (I'm pretty sure) excessive caution to prevent liability and stay within ethical bounds (but then, IANAL). But AFAIK (IANAL!) there's no remotely-realistic risk to someone who's not a lawyer, and has not represented themselves as a lawyer, posting opinions about the law in a context in which nobody with two brain cells to rub together might for some reason believe they're a lawyer without their saying so (i.e. this isn't LawyerNewsOnlyForLawyersAllOurUsersAreLawyers.com), without such a disclaimer.

As far as I can tell, this is the result of people reading lawyers announcing that they are lawyers and posting such a disclaimer, and other posters specifying "I am not a lawyer" purely out of consideration for the reader, not out of legal obligation, and getting the two all mixed up together, while deciding that both are necessary (I'm quite sure one is not, and I'm pretty sure the other one isn't exactly necessary, either).

Consider how many published pieces and TV news programs feature people who are and are not lawyers, providing opinions about the law, typically with none of these disclaimers. It's evidently not a problem. I think lawyers only bother to do it in forums because there's some remote chance that someone might be able to argue they were mislead by the conversational and two-sided nature of the medium into thinking the lawyer had taken them as a client or was offering advice in an official capacity (I'm skeptical such a case would get very far, in any event, though).

There are specific issues around giving legal advice as a non-lawyer which could come up. There are also areas (securities law) where something could be construed as investment advice and even a non professional giving that advice is exposed to Consequences for doing so.

(Also it is fun to add “for external use only” etc disclaimers.)

I always thought it's to prevent people from taking any advice and actually acting on it in a legal case they're involved in(as in IANAL so don't actually use my advice in a court case since it may be complete BS).

Potential legal issues aside, I also give disclaimers like "I am not an entomologist" as a way of introducing myself as a fellow interested amateur and leaving room for an actual entomologist to come in and contradict me.

IANAL but no. I sometimes add it to remind people that if they want real legal advise they should contact a lawyer and to avoid sounding too authoritative.

I might be misunderstanding, and haven't read anything other than this twitter thread, but it sounds like this is the discovery process in the lawsuit filed by the State of California against Amazon, in which Molson is a witness. It doesn't sound like Amazon is suing him for anything, but the discovery process in big cases can be a lot, and the requests are overwhelming him.

As such, given that he's not actually a party to the suit, I'd think that California and its attorneys should be assisting Molson with document requests?

Based on the discovery requests, it appears Amazon is mostly requesting documents and discovery from him that CA can't help him with, since Molson is in control of those documents.

Being an expert witness usually means that the party employing your services generally pays for your time to respond to discovery requests. In this case, it appears he was cited in CA's complaint but CA did not actually engage him as an expert witness so it doesn't appear (based on the Twitter thread) that he is being paid for his testimony.

Third parties can require reasonable compensation for complying with discovery requests.

As all of the requested documents should be standard business records kept in the normal course of running his sales business, and he does not have any employees, "reasonable compensation" in this matter is presumed to be zero unless he can demonstrate to a judge otherwise.

TFT clearly says "And in response [to being a witness for CA], Amazon served me with a lawsuit"

If you zoom in on the picture of him being served, the legal documents he's holding indicate the case is between the state of California and Amazon. He is neither plaintiff or defendant. It is a subpoena not a lawsuit.

In practical terms - its still basically Amazon, acting through the courts, trying to effectively strangle him.

I think that's what was driving when he said "Amazon served me".

Agreed, but half the comments here are getting hung up on him saying he's being sued when it really appears that he isn't. Which then brings in the "what did he do that is appropriate to sue over?" arguments...which can't be answered, because he isn't being sued.

They're not hung up on anything.

They're holding firm that this is (in essence) a SLAPP. Whether it's a lawsuit proper or a subpoena resulting from a document request filed to the court by Amazon (and affecting the activist exactly as Amazon intended) is an almost irrelevant technical detail.

Given his available paths and options of how to proceed are vastly different between being sued himself and being subpoenaed in a lawsuit between other parties, I would not call it an irrelevant technical detail.

Just curious - what does the word "subpoena" mean to you?

A subpoena is an order from a court to produce something. That something can be a person, documents, objects...whatever.

What does it mean to you?

You seem to be nitpicking when the reality is that this is a person who is aggrieved at service of legal process, caused by Amazon, unjustly compelling him to do disproportionately onerous legal work, all in an attempt to discredit and/or dissuade him, and/or gain something for a countersuit. It's really not clear where you're going with this nitpicking, nor why. For the common person that's a pretty damn good approximation to being "sued", not that most people in this comment thread have actually said that in any case. So it's either a weird flex or a pretty bad faith attempt to throw up chaff.

Ok here I'll spell it out for you:

Initial person said: "hey this actually looks like a subpoena not him being sued"

Next person said: "The dude involved said lawsuit, duh"

Me: "If you look at the actual documents the dude involved posted a picture of, it's a subpoena not a lawsuit"

You and that other account: "these are the same thing because both can be tools to suppress others"

The point that a subpoena can also be a tool to suppress someone is valid. I don't know why it's an issue in this specific branch of the thread, which started with someone pointing out a valid factual error, which got a flippant response ignoring what they said, and then I pointed out the evidence in the source that backs up the factual error reported by the previous poster.

Your fight isn't with me it's with someone else but you seem to have latched on to me for whatever reason.

Anyway, have a great day ;-D

It's operationally significant, for sure.

I just mean in the background of the broader picture -- of a large company taking advantage of the legal process to silence a bothersome critic.

Nobody's being strangled. These are standard discovery requests.

IIRC you aren't entitled to a court-provided lawyer in civil proceedings.

Although I guess the question is whether or not the AG could/should ask their legal council to represent the witness to some degree to fight these overbearing document requests.

He's not a defendant, he's a prosecutor's witness. The state ought to be covering him here, or they risk losing his testimony.

My understanding is that you can be subpoenaed to testify as a witness and they don't need to make you whole.

Correct, but there is a bit of an unstated threat any time you do this to one of your own witnesses where the witness may give testimony that is not as persuasive to your version of events as you’d like.

“The car was blue.” versus “Well it was dark out and I didn’t have my glasses on but maybe the car was blue.”

Plain old witnesses, yes. Expert witnesses get paid when you pull them in to support your case.

The State of California should also have some reasonable interest here in protecting their expert witness from retaliation, so they can continue to obtain qualified expert witnesses in future cases.

This is usually the case. Having served as an expert witness in CA, this is what I was afforded. I still had my own legal team to interface with the state, but that was baked into my fee.

Practically California should be helping him, because otherwise one of their supporting witnesses might get their testimony undermined.

I think he is both:

* he is a witness for the Amazon vs CA case

* he is also, separately, being sued by Amazon, where he is a defendant

From the (shitty twitter thread) article:

>But nothing happened until November 2022 when the state of California filed a complaint against Amazon.

>They cited me and made me a witness.

>And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit.

I wonder if that isn't just mixing up "lawsuit" with "subpoena".

I think you are probably right, that had not occurred to me.

One more reason to ignore Twitter threads...

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has an open investigation on similar issues:

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/investigation-into-amazons-mark...

>The CMA is investigating Amazon’s conduct in relation to the way that non-public third-party seller data may be used within Amazon’s retail business, *how Amazon sets criteria for selecting which product offer is placed within the ‘Buy Box’* and *which sellers can list products under Amazon’s ‘Prime label’* on its Marketplace in the UK.

>If you are a third-party seller on Amazon’s Marketplace that would like to get in touch with us about our investigation, please contact us via email at amazonmarketplaceinvestigation@cma.gov.uk

Oh they do it. When I offered a self published book at a lower price on another site I got an automated email from Amazon saying my product would be de-promoted if I did not sell it at the same price on Amazon.

I'm a former litigator.

Third party discovery is generally a pain in the ass. The parties to a lawsuit have some rights to compel witnesses to share documents etc. Often it's hard to push back but eventually you just stop responding and the party to the litigation needs to decide how worth it is (without pissing off the judge) to make your life hell. Sounds like Amazon is going hard on this guy.

What is the worst thing that can happen if you stop responding?

Being found in contempt of court.

Penalty range from a slap on the wrist to jail time.

This article is pretty good: https://www.cades.com/2022/07/11/third-party-subpoenas-whos-...

Basically it goes like this: -they send you a subpoena, you kinda try to respond

-they tell you they want more documents and your response is insufficient, and they threaten that the subpoena is issued with the authority of the court and contempt is a potential remedy etc

-if you get really annoyed, you threaten to (or actually move to) quash the subpoena

-Ultimately the judge is supposed to determine whether, based on the resources available to you, the subpoena is causing you "significant expense." If it is, the judge needs to ensure the expense isn't too significant by working with you.

If you're being careful and paying a lawyer for all of this, this can be pretty damn expensive to go through. I guess in theory if you just fire from the hip yourself and try to learn the rules (probably not advised) you could be OK, but then you risk making little errors that Amazon will blast you and your testmiony with.

> without pissing off the judge

I find it interesting that many lawyers in the US have this POV.

Why do you find that interesting? The judge ultimately decides a ton of MASSIVELY important issues for you, and your job as a lawyer is to maintain credibility with them.

> Why do you find that interesting?

I understand the need to maintain proper court room decorum, but "don't piss the judge off" runs counter to everything we are supposed to believe about the US judicial system being based on fair and impartial judiciary.

"Fair and impartial" is aspirational:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect

The hungry judge effect hasn't replicated well. For example, https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/... , and a few years ago it was pointed out that the actual effect in the original paper seems too large and precise to be true: https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-...

Ah. "Don't piss off the judge" can mean a lot of things to me, and the way I was using it here is (I think) actually pretty fair.

It could (but shouldn't) mean: avoid the judge's biases and pet peeves.

When I said it I meant: while Amazon may legally have the right to ask for 100x what it really needs, the judge will (rightly) ask them to bring that down to 1 to 5x, and if they fight the judge on it, they may lose the judge's patience for other more important issues.

I know your answer will likely be "it depends on the judge" but in your experience, do judges tend to lean towards some degree of lee-way wrt court rules?

I only have limited experience through my own involvements with the legal system, but it seemed like every judge, pro-tem, and magistrate I've dealt with showed some flexibility with certain court rules.

And, my limited opinion is lawyers very much push the boundaries what is allowed by the rules, up until they know they will certainly earn a judicial rebuke. I mean, that is part of your craft as a skilled lawyer.

I'd say yes in some ways, no in others.

The yes is that yes, judges generally have pretty wide discretion in applying any given rule, and they apply their own sense of what's reasonable given the circumstances. They're more likely to go out of their way to help a pro se litigant who's making a good effort and bend the rules to make things move along fairly.

The no is that judges are allowed to impose their own 'local rules' about little things like how many holes should be punched in the filings submitted to them. If you fuck these up they are generally sticklers for them and get unreasonably (From our perspective as lawyers) upset about this.

The other call out is the sentencing guidelines in criminal law. You can google it, but there's been some controversy and history about how much judges can 'deviate' from the sentencing guidelines when giving convicted criminals their jail time.

> but "don't piss the judge off" runs counter to everything we are supposed to believe about the US judicial system being based on fair and impartial judiciary

“Don’t piss off the judge” is shorthand for don’t abuse the rules. You have the right to ask for anything. But the judge has to consider reasonableness. If you always dial it to eleven, you’re going to adjust the judge’s priors, and that loses you the benefit of doubt in future requests.

It's not a personal issue. It's doing something like pushing code that you haven't tested. It gets you higher scrutiny in the future and annoys everyone.

Any resources you’d suggest short of a google to understand the nuances of litigation as an engineer building products / writing things online

The big corp I work for has many fun “speak up” policies. And after few years here I can tell only thing - speaking up is probably the fastest way to get in trouble. So yeah, the companies like silence and will send lawyers and/or Human Resources representatives to fix all the issues.

Agreed. This has been my experience as well.

Corporations like to have an internal culture and will put on a show to keep up appearances, but deep down what every manager, from the lowest level to the SVPs, what they want is to not look bad and by association, for their team to not look bad. Speaking up attracts unwanted attention across the company and that makes 'waves'.

As representatives of the business, there are lots of 'tools' managers have at their disposal, but none of them will put the company in a worse position, so your best outcome is a situation where both the company and you win. In all other situations, assuming no external involvement, you will come off worse for speaking up.

For example, if you speak up against some sexist remarks made by a company SVP, the corp will put on a dog and pony show at best, and then you will be managed out for making waves.

If you really want to come out ahead, make sure you can do some serious damage to the company so you have some leverage. Naively speaking up with nothing else in your pocket is going to get you crushed like a cockroach or paraded around like a pet at all-hands and 'celebrated' while all the higher ups make sure that no real changes are made.

Not a lawyer, not legal advice.

(I'm not going to criticize a man who runs an educational toy company for not being precise about "lawsuit" "discovery" "subpoena" etc.)

I believe (subject to clarification) that he's a fact (regular) witness in CA's action against Amazon, and the discovery requests from Amazon are overly burdensome to him. He has no commercial interest in this litigation (except very attenuated benefit to his company if the Amazon policies change). It's unclear if this is just unthinking automatic action by Amazon/their lawyers, truly necessary for their case, or intentionally vexatious behavior, but it does seem clear there are two effects:

1) Silence critics of well resourced or litigious organizations 2) Promote anonymous speech (if they couldn't figure out who posted information, they'd have no one to vex through the courts.)

If I were not directly a party to something like this, I'd be very motivated to not expose myself to months/years of pain. None of this sold more educational toys for him in any volume. Using his specific identity and other stuff did add credibility to his initial arguments, but from reading the original blog post, it stands on its own merits, and especially if it had been a "name shaped pseudonym", I wouldn't have questioned it.

I clarified with him on twitter and in fact my “most charitable” interpretation was correct (although he got $32 as a paid witness; I guess inflation! I remember when this was $10-12 and parking validation).

I hope someone at Amazon sees this and reigns in their lawyers; he is not their enemy and making him and a bunch of other fans of Amazon (including me) into adversaries for no reason is…not in the best interest of Amazon or AMZN shareholders.)

Wouldn't he be able to recover the costs for complying with the subpoena under Cal. Evidence Code section 1563?

"All reasonable costs incurred in a civil proceeding by a witness who is not a party with respect to the production of all or any part of business records requested pursuant to a subpoena duces tecum shall be charged against the party serving the subpoena duces tecum."

Something's not adding up about his twitter posts.

I read the thread but can't tell what Amazon's lawsuit alleges. Are they suing him for slander or something?

I don’t think he’s being sued at all. I think his blog post was cited as evidence in a lawsuit and so now Amazon’s lawyers are subjecting him to any and all discovery they can reasonably claim is even remotely related.

From the linked tweets: https://twitter.com/Molson_Hart/status/1663582603906088961

> Amazon served me with a lawsuit.

He seems to be confused.

The state of California is using him as a witness for their lawsuit against Amazon. Amazon lawyers are trying to discredit him. Amazon is not suing him directly but they have discovery rights

That's what I assumed too, but the thread clearly says "And in response [to being a witness], Amazon served me with a lawsuit". So either he's misrepresenting the situation or Amazon is playing hardball and should face an anti-SLAPP

likely just speaking imprecisely

I don't think that is fully correct.

Yes he is a witness to the State of California's case. However, if he had to turn over documents per Amazon's request as part of the State of California's case, he would be entitled to request Amazon pay for the costs to produce those documents (usually something in response like my hourly rate is $100/hr and it will take me 20 hours to produce).

However, separately, Amazon has named him party to a lawsuit (what they are alleging is not disclosed), which allows Amazon to compel production of documents, and given he is a named party to the lawsuit, is fully responsible for the cost.

> he would be entitled to request Amazon pay for the costs to produce those documents

Actually he would request that payment from California - they are the ones that hired him as an expert witness, not Amazon.

I don't know how it works in California, but in WA, the requestor pays.

Even when the requestor is the defendant? That seems open to abuse: The government sues someone, and then they have to pay huge sums just to get the documents to defend themselves.

I'm not a lawyer, but there are many ways the legal system can be weaponized.

My understanding is all evidence that can be used during trial must be turned over to the other party (barring some Perry Mason type last minute discovery that occurs during trial).

If as a defendant, you request documents, and the cost to reproduce is so "huge" as to be a burden towards justice, I imagine you could take that to a judge with a motion to compel, and have the cost amount knocked down substantially.

> separately, Amazon has named him party to a lawsuit

Is there a source for this? It seems very unlikely given the circumstances, including effect of the statute of limitations which seem to bar most plausible actions by this time...

Two thoughts (and check with an attorney!)

1. You may be able to file an Anti-SLAPP motion.

2. You could consider filing a complaint with the SEC.

Unless I am mistaken in my reading-between-the-lines, he is upset about the volume of discovery in the State of California lawsuit against Amazon where he has been named an expert witness.

The volume of discovery would be completely normal in such a case, but would be rejected by any sane judge if Amazon were suing him personally for ... libel? I'm not sure what Amazon even could sue him for, criticizing the company isn't a crime.

Is the state not reimbursing/covering these costs related to their lawsuit? I can't imagine anyone would ever be an expert witness if they had to bear all costs either party or the judge imposes on them.

I don't know the answer to your question, but I do know that expert witnesses often charge extremely high rates for their services. Perhaps those rates are so high, in part, to compensate for all of this hassle.

I'm not familiar with how lawsuit process works in the US, but wouldn't the fact that he got served imply that he actually got sued by Amazon? Or is it normal that witness gets served as well?

Discovery is weird, and if you ever get a request for it from someone with more money/lawyers than sense, you really should get your OWN lawyer to push back, as there are ways to get them to pay for it.

It’s unclear to me in the Twitter thread. Also, IANAL.

If he is an expert witness, surely he can get California to reimburse him, including for any attorney’s fees.

If this is Rule 45 third-party discovery, look at Rule 45(d)(1) and get an attorney. Maybe read this, too:

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/com...

It looks like Amazon is asking for documents (via subpoena) beyond what the state was in an attempt to overburden him so he decides to stop being a witness.

Federal Rule #26 is always Interesting on disclosure.

"Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 26 was amended in 1993 to require the disclosure of related case materials without awaiting a discovery request. In the 2000 case Kleiner v. Burns the court interpreted Rule 26 to include backup media, and even deleted files." - "2028 - A Dystopian Story" By Jack Ganssle.

“Do I Really Have To Do That?” Rule 26(a)(1) Disclosures and Electronic Information:

https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer...

Rule 26. Duty to Disclose; General Provisions Governing Discovery:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_26

> So Amazon's lawyers want to show that I'm lying or wrong. > That's why they've requested all these documents. > They want to find the ones which make me look bad.

The guy volunteered to be an expert witness... Of course the defense will try to make him look like an incompetent. What did he expect exactly? He should be angry at the California AG for not supporting him properly, but expecting outrage at Amazon for defending their interests in a lawsuit mostly shows a lack of understanding how litigation works.

> but expecting outrage at Amazon for defending their interests in a lawsuit mostly shows a lack of understanding how litigation works.

This is cast as an aspersion of the author, but this seems like a perfectly reasonable position for someone who isn't an expert in law to find themselves in.

He literally co-founded an IP litigation related business.

https://www.molsonhart.com/

It seems fair to assume a founder would have (or would have developed by now) this foundational understanding.

> The guy volunteered to be an expert witness

From what I gather from the article, no, he didn't. The CA Attorney General named him as a witness without asking or notifying him. Which does, I think, mean he ought to be asking the CA Attorney General's office for help with this.

I'm guessing the critical issue is this assertion in the original blog post

If we sell our products for less on channels outside Amazon and Amazon detects this, our products will not appear as prominently in search and, if you do find them, they will lose their prime check mark and with that, their sales.

Everything else seems pretty straightforward facts or opinions, but that bit attributes some significant behavior to Amazon without providing any sort of evidence that it happens.

But wouldn’t Amazon be in the best position to have the evidence they do or do not engage in this behavior? Surely if anyone knows whether Amazon reduces product search visibility and the product’s prime checkmark it’s Amazon.

I don't think this is even in dispute. I'm a seller on Amazon and they'll suppress my listings (hide from search results, hide the buy button on listings) if I offer a lower price on my own website.

They have some details about it here:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...

I'm not sold that it's reasonable to equate "losing Featured Offer status because of violating objective criteria" with "Amazon is suppressing my listings". Amazon does look at off-Amazon prices to decide whether to feature an offer, but abstractly that's entirely justifiable from a consumer-friendly perspective: if Amazon knows something is available for less elsewhere but still promotes the sale they are setting up the buyer for a negative experience and themselves & the seller for excess returns and/or customer service hassles. If Amazon doesn't look at external prices at all then they have no way to protect against price gouging on platform. It seems like what's implicitly being asked for here is a special carve out to sell for less "on your own website", but that feels like a really slippery slope: what qualifies as "your own"--e.g. would an Etsy store? a drop shipper storefront?

>I'm not sold that it's reasonable to equate "losing Featured Offer status because of violating objective criteria" with "Amazon is suppressing my listings".

In my experience (again, I'm just one data point), they do more than just deny featured offer status. They bury my product in searches and then when the customer finds my listing, Amazon hides the "Buy" button and shows a more subtle "See All Buying Options" button. [0]

>It seems like what's implicitly being asked for here is a special carve out to sell for less "on your own website", but that feels like a really slippery slope: what qualifies as "your own"--e.g. would an Etsy store? a drop shipper storefront?

I don't think there should be a carve out for sellers' own sites. I don't think Amazon should be suppressing any products that have lower prices elsewhere.

>if Amazon knows something is available for less elsewhere but still promotes the sale they are setting up the buyer for a negative experience and themselves & the seller for excess returns and/or customer service hassles

They shift this burden onto the merchants anyway. When a customer has a support request or complaint, it goes directly to me. I eat all the costs of returns and refunds.

That is to say, I don't think Amazon is suppressing these listings because they're just so darned committed to only offer the best deals to their customers. It seems much more likely that Amazon's practice is designed to preserve their dominance by preventing any other merchants from offering lower pricing. They'd never have the gall or leverage to do this if they didn't have such a stranglehold on the entire ecommerce ecosystem.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2023/01/#adapting-to-the-s...

I understand that this sucks for specific merchants like you (or OP's Viahart), but if you consider it holistically (across all merchants and products in a category) I think it's a lot less sinister. Imagine some vendor sources a cheap POE KVM from Alibaba, lists it on Amazon for $250, and advertises against your brand keyword, hoping some people looking for your stuff will think "hm might not be as good but it costs half as much, I'll give it a try". If Amazon knows that same item is available on Bestbuy for $50 it's obviously not a good deal for consumers, but also wouldn't you want them to "suppress" that listing? Now scale that across millions of products--there's no longer people making decisions, it's just algorithms looking for signals. Is there a better or more objective criterion they can use than "this is for sale elsewhere for a lower price"?

Honestly, no. I don't want merchants refusing to sell items just because they discover that they're not the lowest price.

I'm willing to pay a premium with certain merchants due to my confidence in their delivery speed and counterfeit protection (e.g., B&H). I wouldn't want B&H to refuse to sell items to me if they noticed other vendors undercutting them on price.

If Amazon was really trying to prevent the user from getting a bad deal, then instead of making the buy button harder to find, they should be saying, "Hey, you can buy from this other website at a lower price."

Also, I'm not talking about anything close to 5x pricing. I was charging a 15% premium on Amazon to offset their fees and higher return rate, and that got my listings suppressed.

All those requests for documents and Amazon lawyers saying it’s not good enough should be ignored. IANAL but they are the petitioner, the onus is on them. Anything you say, said, publicly, on a podcast, in Congress, is free-speech. Come at me bro.

Yeah, this is exactly the opposite of what you should do. If Amazon filed a lawsuit against them, these requests are probably apart of discovery. Failure to comply with requests for docs or depositions during discovery can have bad consequences for the plaintiff.

he complied... the lawyers said that wasn't sufficient. As someone who may self represent, the courts have a responsibility to ensure due process and a timely case. He submitted documents. He didn't refuse. I'm suggesting refusing the follow ups but by all means, submit the documents for discovery.

IANAL also, but who knows, there could be some technicality or loophole that lets them do shit like that

Btw Fuck Amazon

Thing with this kind of lawsuit... If you win, you win nothing. If you lose, you lose your house and are in debt for life.

It's a lose lose situation. Which is exactly why I have no public opinion on Amazon, unless anyone wants to ask me off the record.

Amazon is a bully and is becoming a brand new type of monopoly that is killing all sorts of businesses.

How in the world is it okay for a single company to be a grocery store, internet infrastructure company, film studio, game studio, online shopping platform, advertising platform, home security company, and more?

They're using their incredible scale to price lots of American businesses out of business. They offer movies for "free", for instance.

Amazon needs to pick its lanes and stick to them. It'd be better for consumers if it were broken up into two or more companies.

I'm also thinking about this through the lens of an entrepreneur. All of these giant multiple category-spanning monopolies can easily duplicate what you do and offer it for free. That's wildly unfair.

That's because globalization leads to single company doing everything.

Think WALL-E's Buy-N-Large [0].

In fact, nowadays just

- 62 persons own the same as half the world [1],

- 5 companies own all media in US (it was 50 companies 40 years ago) [2]

- 147 companies own 40% of public companies [3] [4]

- 737 companies control 80% of public companies [3] [4]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/21266860/wall-e-pixar-movie-yesterd...

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/62-people-own-same-h...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/49229c/til_i...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/11/21/the-147-c...

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728

I am not saying Amazon is good, so please do not assume I am defending Amazon by posting this comment and asking this question.

Molson has claimed something and then got interviewed by an important podcast, and ended up testifying the congress about his claim. Now the party that he has been making the claim about is asking him to provide the evidence that he based his writing on.

I am not sure if I understand what part of it is unfair or bad? Could someone please explain what part of this is unfair as it looks like he, because of his claim, is a witness for the case.

Given that he was involved by California, could they not shoulder some of the cost of his paperwork work?

When I was subpoenaed in a case where I was working as an expert, "my side" paid for the time I spent responding to the subpoena. Seems to me that the author's complaint should be with the California AG, not worth Amazon's lawyers.

Amazon is shit. Dear amazon. come ruin me haha. They are filled with egotistical people stuck running a hamster wheel...

One of the most toxic work cultures in tech

One of the most polarizing, some people prefer Amazon's style of working.

Not only for their tech workers, for their 3rd party sellers, their suppliers, their blue collar workers, etc as well… this company is just rotten to the core…

This seems complicated and messy. A few random thoughts, I am not a lawyer...

* being a critic of Amazon's policies IS being a critic of Amazon. There is nothing wrong with either but let's not pretend they are different.

* he made a specific claim: that amazon's policies increased prices for consumers, that is VERY hard to define, let alone. You could argue just as well that their policies REDUCED prices on Amazon. I think that was foolish as he has invited this suit and now has to offer some defence. If his claims were repeated to congress, he might have some immunity there, but I don't think that applies to a civil suit...

* the CA DA who brought the main case should be assisting here, as he is "their witness". That might mean helping get documents, it might mean quashing requests for them etc.

* the US legal system is a huge mess and basically whoever is willing to spend the most money probably wins. "Don't hate the player" etc.

* I wonder how courts will rule on this policy, I can see arguments both ways...

SOP for large companies. They can kill you just by sitting on you.

America needs "loser pays tort reform". The process shouldn't be the punishment.

> America needs "loser pays tort reform".

That would be awful.

A lot of lawsuits are done on contingency because the litigant can't afford to pay their own legal bills. It would for sure have a chilling effect if you sue a big company and then you have to declare bankruptcy if you lose.

Loser pays causes higher legal fees, because on average, one only has to pay half of one's own fees, and also because losing becomes more costly making it worth it to spend more to try to avoid losing.

Typical tactics. They request an insane amount of documents. It's a DoS attack, nothing else. Their goal is to drown you until you give up. They don't care about your documents or anything.

As much as I hate the idea of a large corporation threatening lawsuits against people to suppress criticism, this situation.... doesn't seem to be that?

From reading the thread, it seems like this individual is a witness/party in a major lawsuit against amazon, and as a part of discovery amazon is asking for documents from this person.

That seems like a fairly reasonably/necessary request from someone who is testifying in a lawsuit?

Someone feel free to correct me, if there are additional issues with amazon in this case.

Totally agreed. This guy literally went to Congress to testify against Amazon. He's not just a guy who just wrote a little blog post, he chose to become a major critic of Amazon and part of a state lawsuit.

I totally commend everything he's doing, but I'm baffled by these tweets. When you go after a corporation, you should know what you're signing up for. Spending 16 hours gathering documents to deal with a subpoena is an expected part of that.

He's complaining about legal bills but hasn't actually explained what they are, and there's so much anti-Amazon hatred out there it seems like it would be pretty easy to get his legal bills covered either by a sympathetic organization, pro bono, or just a GoFundMe or something.

So I don't get what he's trying to accomplish by complaining. If there were a button to donate money towards legal fees, this would make a lot more sense. But there isn't.

Hart says "Amazon served me with a lawsuit,"[0] but it was Amazon who was sued by California citing Hart as a witness to support the lawsuit. Hart is having to go through discovery as part of that.[1][2] Amazon is allowed to do this discovery, on the theory it should be able to scrutinize claims being made against it, particularly when billions of dollars are at stake.

Hart's estimate for the fees Amazon charges him seem approximately the same as the fees Amazon estimates it would charge for products like his.[3] Given that, perhaps he shouldn't matter much for the lawsuit. But the law is vague, often saying something is prohibited only when it is bad for competition. So vague claims of what helps vs hurts competition matters, which is why Hart's testimony matters.

Most stores choose not to feature items that one can readily buy cheaper elsewhere. So what exactly is the state's theory about when that is legal or not in such a way it is illegal for Amazon to be doing -- and is the state's theory here supported by the laws?

The problem really is the laws around what is anti-competitive are vague & subjective. As a result, everyone has to spend a ton of money on lawyers (and lobbyists) to figure out an outcome. Instead of this, the legislature should revise the law to be clear. I assume this is not done because the lawyers and lobbyists like the flow of money to them created by vague laws, but it also might be because vague laws are easier for the legislature to write.

[0] https://twitter.com/Molson_Hart/status/1663582603906088961

[1] https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2022-...

[2] https://twitter.com/Molson_Hart/status/1663601424226189315

[3] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/revcalpublic look up "B06XJCKS46"

One thing that nicely threads the needle between "he's just a witness in the AG" and "he was sued by amazon in a separate matter," is if he lives in a state other than California, and Amazon had to file a special matter in his home state in order to enforce the subpoena issued in the California case.

It's confusing, given what information he provided, and I'm not really clear what's going on.

This could also lead to jail time for the guy. If he fails to properly respond to the discovery and deposition requests then the court can indict him for criminal contempt.

I've known many people spend significant time in jail for contempt for not complying with court orders, mostly in the sphere of child support payments that they can't afford to make, so they are sent to jail to learn how to be less poor.

UGGghh. Amazon didn't serve anyone with a lawsuit. Amazon is being sued and the AG called you as a witness.

If you're making waves about something important, you're going to get the good parts (testifying before a sympathetic congress) and the bad (testifying before antagonistic lawyers in conference rooms).

this guy needs his own lawyer. being a witness (expert or otherwise) in case doesn't mean the lawyers who want you to testify are _your_ lawyers.

these sorts of subpoenas can sometimes be whittled down with only a little bit of effort. and even if they're not, you can bill for your costs to satisfy them.

I am not a lawyer, however this person should definitely hire one. On a cursory reading it appears they need to comply with any discovery requests that match those requested by the California AG's office, which they should already have prepared so its minimal additional effort to comply with, any sort of vexacious requests beyond this can be denied and they could potentially file an anti-SLAPP suit against Amazon as well.

The main point though is this guy should not be writing huge Twitter threads where he's making statements that are not precisely accurate (lawsuit vs subpoena) and should hire a qualified attorney to deal with this.

The general rules are here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_45

Of note is rule 45(d), which states in part:

A party or attorney responsible for issuing and serving a subpoena must take reasonable steps to avoid imposing undue burden or expense on a person subject to the subpoena. The court for the district where compliance is required must enforce this duty and impose an appropriate sanction—which may include lost earnings and reasonable attorney's fees—on a party or attorney who fails to comply.

> If they lose, they could be broken up for being a monopoly.

Correct. Monopolies have been given a pass because they supposedly have not raised prices for consumers. If it can be shown that they have then their argument falls apart.

It is a right action by Amazon towards companies that have stock due to the discrepancy between the value of the goods and the real price that these same products are sold on Amazon by companies with the same profile

Threaded: <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1663582588210905091.html>

I’m not sure I follow why this is even a fact at issue? If Amazon policy applies a price floor to all Amazon sellers on all platforms they sell the product on then of course Amazon has caused higher prices for consumers elsewhere. Sure the policy has also probably resulted in lower prices for some products on Amazon but it seems undeniable that the external result would be higher prices on other platforms for some products.

This is why anonymity in this country matters when it comes to the little guy criticizing the big guy.

That's some interesting editorializing. "I criticized Amazon's policies in a blog" and "I testified before congress about how Amazon was bad for American consumers" are not exactly the same thing. Not that I'm saying he's in the wrong, but this titling is a bit clickbaity.

> Amazon doesn't allow sellers to price their products for less off-Amazon.

If Amazon has such a policy, they sure don't enforce it. I found a product cheaper elsewhere and wanted to see if Amazon would price match. Their response was: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... tl;Dr, it says no.

Sounds like Moneyland at work.

This title is a lie.

Amazon is doing stuff because California is suing Amazon and cited this person as a witness.

The blog has exactly zero to do with it.

And since this HN title comes from the author himself, and is a blatant lie, I don't trust anything else he says.

Has the title changed?

At the present time, it is "I criticized Amazon’s policies in a blog. Their lawyers are trying to ruin me" which appears to be entirely accurate.

The title is as you quoted it, and no it's not in the slightest accurate. Amazon is not doing something because of a blog, as I told you: It's because California is calling him as a witness.

Implying the blog had anything to do with it is simply a lie.

Wasn't he called as a witness because of the blog?

He wasn't "called", i.e. involuntary, rather he was hired as a witness, i.e. they are paying him, and he could say no if he wanted to.

What I take from this: Keep your head down & your mouth shut. It’s no face, no trace, no case out here.

Also siding with the state of California instead of Amazon would be signaling red alarms in my head. Nothing those states (NY, CA, WA, CO, etc) are involved in right now is morally legit.

> Amazon doesn't allow sellers to price their products for less off-Amazon.

A billion Chinese sellers don't care; they sell the same product under different names all over the place at random prices.

> This keeps prices off-Amazon high, which is bad for consumers.

Implausible.

Just from a technical viewpoint; Amazon is not able to police things that go on entirely within their site, never mind outside.

This buffoon stupidly picked a fight with Amazon's lawyers for nothing.

Amazon could not find a product off-Amazon, and a product on-Amazon, and determine that they are the same, if their lives depended on it.

Just a single data point: I'm an e-commerce seller. I sell on both Amazon and my own website. When I raise prices on Amazon to offset Amazon's fees, Amazon buries my listings and hides the buy button. To restore the listing, I have to reduce Amazon's price to match my site's or raise prices on my site to match Amazon.

It's not hard for them to find my website because I have to give it to them in the onboarding process to prove I'm authorized to sell my product.

If that's so, can't you find out where they are connecting from (or other attributes) and show them a different website?

How would one distinguish an Amazon bot visitor from a legitimate visitor?

Unless Amazon goes out of it's way to announce itself (and why would it?), I don't see how a merchant would identify an Amazon price checking bot.

This is not something that can be solved with speculation; only hands-on.

If I had to solve the problem, my first line of attack would be to feed them a domain or URL only they know about, if possible. So that if there are visitors, they must be Amazon insiders. I'd look for any helpful clues in their access information or patterns.

I'd make sure that only entities which can solve a Captcha can view the price information.

If Amazon uses humans for this task, I'm guessing they are low-paid overseas workers. We may be able to feed them different content based on geography, which will work if the target market for our products is the developed world.

Other ideas: I'd have the prices appear not as text but images only. OCR would be required to get the numeric value.

Time based: high prices appear on the site first in text form, but after a javascripted time delay, they are covered up by images showing the real price. The robot would have to execute the time delay to wait for the real data, and OCR it from images.

Another idea: don't show prices at all, except to logged-in users who have created an account on your site, verified by e-mail.

Offer lower prices through a non-web channel. If you can get some users to subscribe to a newsletter, there you can publish secret URL's that unlock discounts.

Anyway, I'm confident I could outwit Amazon with one brain hemisphere tied behind my back. (Left or right, doesn't matter).

It doesn't sound like you have much experience in e-commerce as almost all of these ideas are wildly impractical.

Hiding prices or playing games with prices means I'm significantly degrading experience for my real customers for the sake of maybe fooling Amazon.

Giving them a fake domain doesn't work because they're independently crawling the web looking for other merchants of the product and could find my real domain.

Offering lower pricing to newsletter subscribers would work, but that's what everyone does anyway and Amazon isn't trying to compete with coupon deals.

So the fact than the Chinese ignore their contractual obligations means those obligations can never be unfair? And yea Amazon can absolutely ban you from selling on Amazon with the push of a button if they catch you selling for less elsewhere. How can you argue that is somehow impossible? Why don't you defend Amazon’s anti-competitive policies on their own merits?

I don't get it? Isn't it illegal to make claims about a company / individual without evidence?

I guess I looked at Amazon's policy in the opposite way, that it probably means that prices on Amazon are equally as low as elsewhere, not that it makes sense to jack up prices everywhere but on Amazon... And Amazon isn't forcing anyone to price products in any given way since sellers are free to remove their products from Amazon if they chose.

Therefore it would seem like this guy has made dubious claims about Amazon that will be difficult to support and is now upset that Amazon is suing him...

Can someone explain why I'm wrong because I probably am. Is this an Amazon problem or an issue with the legal system (or maybe both)?

Not that I should have to say it, but obviously I don't support anti-competitive practises.

A person can make any claims in America without needing any evidence.

But if they make those claims in court, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim.

The Twitter person did not make the claim in court. Not sure why his lawyers are presenting more evidence to Amazon. It is not his burden.

Amazon is not suing him. The state of California is suing Amazon and he is a witness to the case. Amazon is burying him with discovery requests. It's not a crime to criticise a company without evidence.

In the Twitter thread he wrote:

> And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit.

I couldn't find that.

> Isn't it illegal to make claims about a company / individual without evidence?

No, it is not.

Opinions are not illegal, and this stuff clearly falls into opinions.

Furthermore, even if his claims were factual claims, the claims would have to be proved to be wrong and it would have to be proved that he acted in malice, and not just ignorance.

Also, he isn't being sued for defamation, so this is a completely unrelated side argument in this situation.

Thanks for clarifying, although I guess I'm still unclear why this isn't considered a "factual claim":

> 1. Amazon doesn't allow sellers to price their products for less off-Amazon. > 2. If they do, Amazon hides their products. > 3. This keeps prices off-Amazon high, which is bad for consumers.

This is being stated as a fact, not an opinion. He isn't saying, "I believe this is bad for consumers", he is claiming that Amazon is doing something that is bad for consumers.

I also see the title has now changed to "subpoenaed" which would seem more accurate. I'm happy to assume Amazon is doing this in bad faith. What I wasn't happy to assume was the dubious claims being made in the Twitter thread about how Amazon's policies were bad for the consumer.

> was the dubious claims being made in the Twitter thread about how Amazon's policies were bad for the consumer.

This isn't a disproveable factual claim.

Something being "bad" is an opinion.

It is also a secondary interpretation. Someone being bad at economics is not defamation.

Defamation would be more like, if someone claimed that Amazon was, I don't know, stealing money from your Amazon account. Because that's a factual action.

Interpreting how amazons actions effect other people is an opinion, not a claim.

And once again, Amazon agrees with me, not you, because they aren't suing anyone for defamation.

Amazon collects a fee for every item sold, something like 10%. What sellers want to do is pass that fee on to the customer while keeping their prices lower at other outlets where the fees aren't as high, so they make a constant margin on every sale. But Amazon doesn't want to develop a reputation as the "product search engine" that you never make an actual purchase through because it's always more expensive than just going to the seller's own website.

So I believe where things have settled is sellers making less than they want to make from sales through Amazon and, bizarrely, more than they intended to make through sales on their own sites, because they can't set a lower price than their Amazon one.

Not 10%, more like 35% when all is said and done. Add in FBA and it’s closer to 45%. add in advertising and the majority of the sale price is going into amazon.

This policy has a "unintended" side-effect of making Amazon always cheaper, since the face-value price has to be the same or higher, and Amazon's advantage is their logistics network it means that cost + shipping is a calculation that Amazon will always win.

I get why Amazon is afraid of this, a bunch of retailers setting Amazon prices higher to drive sales to their own site, but this would really just push Amazon to quantify and charge directly for their value as a discovery platform.

This doom situation really has to explain why it hasn't killed Target and why retailers wouldn't be willing to pay Amazon a premium for an additional sales avenue.

> So I believe where things have settled is sellers making less than they want to make from sales through Amazon and, bizarrely, more than they intended to make through sales on their own sites, because they can't set a lower price than their Amazon one.

So companies are making less on the products they sell through Amazon because as you say "sellers want to do is pass that fee on to the customer" but can't because Amazon's policies prevent this and this bad for the consumer because?

You also didn't explain why businesses are forced to use Amazon. Is it not possible for companies to just not sell if they can't charge the consumer 10% more as they would like?

> So companies are making less on the products they sell through Amazon because as you say "sellers want to do is pass that fee on to the customer" but can't because Amazon's policies prevent this and this bad for the consumer because?

Amazon doesn't prevent them to pass that fee to the customer. They do that. However, that means that other places the fee is also included in listings outside of amazon (which means more profit for the seller). The problem is that now the customer have to essentially pay for amazon, regardless if they use it or not. For the seller this particular thing is not that much of an issue.

> You also didn't explain why businesses are forced to use Amazon. Is it not possible for companies to just not sell if they can't charge the consumer 10% more as they would like?

Amazon has a de facto monopoly on e-commerce. So, sellers are incentivised to have their products there. They don't have to, but they will probably make more money if they do. That just feeds the monopoly and make the customer worse off.

It's not clear whether it's bad for consumers who shop using Amazon, since they're getting some hand-wavy amount of "value" out of using Amazon's product search and free shipping. But it's certainly bad for consumers who shop directly from a seller's website. They're essentially subsidizing the seller's lost margin on Amazon sales without realizing it, and not benefiting from the free shipping or rewards points that the Amazon purchasers are.

The net effect is it doesn't make sense for consumers to shop anywhere but Amazon if a seller has already decided to bite the bullet of selling on Amazon. You'd think the free shipping and rewards points and hosting costs and Amazon's profit margins would all contribute to the price being higher on Amazon, but they don't because of this policy. So as a consumer, you're crazy not to take advantage of those rewards (or you're just feeling charitable to the seller, who does make a lot more when you buy directly).

> You also didn't explain why businesses are forced to use Amazon.

I'm not arguing a position anywhere near that outlandish. In fact, I'm not even trying to argue for a position! I'm just trying to describe the effects of Amazon's policy on the market. For what it's worth, I don't think their policy is uniquely onerous. For all I know it's significantly less restrictive than some of the deals brick-and-mortar stores have struck with their suppliers.

We probably agree that the "correct" way to deal with this is for suppliers to quit Amazon and lower their prices, if they truly think they're getting a bad deal. But the unfortunate reality is that our markets are extremely heavily regulated, so you'd be a fool not to at least try the courts now and again to see if you can make your deal better that way.

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