Angie’s List Sues Amazon Local | Hacker News Reader

Angie’s List Sues Amazon Local

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55 pointslutesfuentes49 comments

I don't understand how the list of highly ranked providers can be a "trade secret" of Angie's List if they make it public to their millions of subscribers. Isn't a trade secret usually something like a closely-guarded process, like the recipe for Coca Cola?

I was under the impression that, like copyright, it mainly hinged on your ability to show your willingness to protect it. That, plus a correct EULA, should protect other companies from using it commercially.

The trade secret angle is a LITTLE baffling.

As far as I know, copyright is not hinged on your ability to show your willingness to protect it, that's trademarks.

Well, trade secret laws vary state by state, but Data General Corp. v. Digital Computer Controls, Inc. seems to support their claim that a paywall is enough to claim the information is "protected."

In that case, Data General sent design documents to anyone who bought their computers, with a contractual agreement informing about their confidentiality, and that was deemed to be protected and therefore DCC to be at fault for using them for making a nearly identical computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Corp._v._Digital_....

Unfortunately, it looks like Hacker News deletes periods at the end of links, so this link won't work.

If you want to read the article, you can just add a period to the end of the URL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Corp._v._Digital_...

You can use %2e at the end of your URL it seems to come out as intended.

Good idea. I've done that above (hopefully icebraining won't mind) and will add it to our list of things to fix (edit: if there's a way to do so that doesn't break normal punctuation). Thanks to both of you!

Stripping periods is probably beneficial more often than not. Also commas and closing parentheses, I imagine. Ideally the script would test url before modifying.

I seriously, just a few minutes before reading this thread, out a period after a URL and was concerned "will this break? who is parsing the links, and in what scenarios will the period accidentally be considered part of the URL?" and decided "engh, I bet nothing expects periods at the end of URLs and thereby it will get chopped off, and people putting periods at the ends of URLs probably learn quickly that that causes problems and avoid doing that"... and then I read this thread ;P.

I actually have seen urls that ended with a long row of commas, now that I think of it. Empty parameters, I guess.

Empty parameters won't affect the url resolution (normally), they'll just be passed as empty to the same url. (Assuming the parameters were in the querystring as they should be...).

No, not in the querystring. I didn't mean GET parameters.

Curiously it works for me, maybe it was fixed?

dang is a moderator and indicated he modified your comment to put the escape sequence.

I agree, if I (as a non-agent of Angie's list) can just sign up and access the data, it's not really a trade secret.

Amazon definitely will have a fairly decent argument that it wasn't a protected trade secret. Typically using an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) as means of protection is fine. But, millions of users who can sign up pay paying a token amount and then click a button or two? NDA might not be enough.

Indiana's trade secret has to be "the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy." But it doesn't have to "extravagant" effort.

But notice that "under the circumstances" is included. If I were angies list, I'd say that they did all they could.

I'm an Angie's List subscriber and signed no NDA agreement with them.

It doesn't make sense for it to be a trade secret, but it could be copyrighted. An exhaustive list of data (like the phonebook) is not copyrightable (in the US, though it may be in other countries), but a selective list can potentially be copyrightable based on the selection criteria.

That said, copyright doesn't prevent someone from using the list and contacting the providers in question. A contract might, and it sounds like Angie's List has a contract that does.

Its the extra value added to the list, often called "collation value". If you take a bunch of public domain resources, and organise and classify them, your organisation and taxonomy is copyrightable even if the resources are not. It is tne IPR associated with the work you put into it.

In the US there has to be a certain level of creativity in the selection and organization to copyright a collection of facts. The classic case is the phone book, where there is no creativity in the selection (everyone with a phone in this region) or the organization (alphabetical order), and so no copyright. Feist vs. Rural Telephone is the major case on this.

That level of creativity is not very high, but it is above zero. See this comment from a couple weeks ago for more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887035

See Feist vs. Rural Telephone Company for an example case of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

For all intents and purposes it states that factual information by itself cannot be copyrighted.

"Instead, it alleges that at least twenty Amazon Local employees signed up for their Angie’s List, some using fake names, and used the information about providers on Angie’s List to approach their competitor’s top rated providers for listings on Amazon Local."

How could Angie's List possibly prove that Amazon Local employees signed up for their service using fake names? If they use IP logs coming from Amazon, that doesn't mean anything, because Amazon employees may be signing up for Angie's List for their own personal reasons, correct?

What am I missing?? Does Angie's List have a strong case here or naw?

Maybe Amazon email addresses or CC's belonging to employees of Amazon? Not clear how they detected the breach...

> Maybe Amazon email addresses

Even if a user registered with an Amazon email address, what does that prove? That an Amazon employee used Angie's List?

As justboxing mentioned, it's completely possible that it was used by Amazon employees for personal use.

> CC's belonging to employees of Amazon

I want to say that's really unlikely. That would mean that there's a database of credit card numbers associated with their owner's employer, which would be troubling on multiple levels.

That's why civil discovery is a thing.

Maybe so. But then there's a difference between a reasonable suspicion and a fishing expedition against a competitor. Will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Would it be possible to JOIN a LinkedIn scrape against a day's ledger of receipts, or sign up log?

> I want to say that's really unlikely. That would mean that there's a database of credit card numbers associated with their owner's employer, which would be troubling on multiple levels.

Sounds like something Acxiom (http://www.acxiom.com/) would likely have.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of lawsuits that are done for strategic reasons, even where the factual grounding isn't super strong. I'm not saying that's necessarily happening here, but it could be the case.

I haven't used Angie's List- but its possible that the 3rd party providers that Angie lists could have told Angie that they are getting unwarranted solicitation.

Maybe they used the equivalent of a trap street[1], creating fake providers to catch scrapers? If Amazon had them in their service, it'd be pretty damning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

So you're proposing that amazon didn't bother to check that the provider was real before listing it on their website? I just don't see amazon blindly adding service providers to their website without any sort of vetting process.

They shouldn't be, they contacted us a Nissan and Infiniti auto and wanted us to sign up. Basically they would take a large percentage off of the top for service items (e.g.: Brake job, Turbo kits install, oil change.) We decided not to because we would have to raise cost to make the same profit.

Well, otherwise Angie's List could have put phone/fax numbers and email addresses owned by them in the contact info of the "trap providers", and so they'd have the records of those attempts by Amazon to check the provider.

>If they use IP logs coming from Amazon, that doesn't mean anything, because Amazon employees may be signing up for Angie's List for their own personal reasons, correct?

According to the lawsuit, Amazon employees were soliciting businesses using the Angie's List messaging feature.

Did you read the court document? Amazon employees signed up, sometimes with fake addresses and then immediately began running wide ranging searches across numerous categories in completely separate areas across the country from their primary residence. Jumping from searching on roofers to dentistry to day spas and everything in between. They have some cases where the Amazon employee even used Angie's List internal messaging system to send service providers messages asking them to run promotions on Amazon Local or to talk to them about business deals. It's the commercial aspect that is forbidden in the TOS.

They have all the search histories of all of these accounts, the titles of the employees at Amazon, their home addresses, etc. It's clear what they were doing, the question is will a judge see it as a pattern attempting to defraud Angie's List and were the employees directed to do this or did they do it on their own.

> If they use IP logs coming from Amazon, that doesn't mean anything, because Amazon employees may be signing up for Angie's List for their own personal reasons, correct?

I don't think this is right. If you're doing it using company resources (the Amazon network/IP), a legal argument could possibly be made that you're doing it on behalf of the company.

This lawsuit will have far reaching ramification.

What if a company buys an app just for competitive benchmarking and then copy the essence of the app's user onboarding or some other aspect of the app's unique features that is considered a trade secrete. Buying an app is like a paywall.

Or what if a company subscribes to a competitor's SAAS service just to copy their most valuable features.

If Angie's List wins this one, I think we should brace for many more to come.

edit: typos

Something tells me that courts will be able to draw a line between scraping data and copying an idea. But who knows, maybe not.

> include computer trespass and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

sigh.

Sigh indeed. The CFAA is a scary statute and it's being used in all kinds of ways.

This could have bad repercussions, but it seems to me like Amazon was in the wrong here. They probably could have just bought this company.

Current market cap of $250 million.http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/angi

Lawsuit is definitely cheaper, probably even if they lose.

And Amazon's is $250 Billion (1000x): http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn

Pretty sure a purchase of AngiesList wouldn't make a dent.

If Amazon spent up to 250 million every time they competed in a new market, they'd run out of cash pretty fast. Big companies won't spend a lot of money unless they expect to make more than that from the purchase.

As an employee at AL I have mixed feelings about an acquisition like that. Part of me fears they would just gut the company. Another part of me hopes that a close working relationship with a more successful technology company would really be beneficial.

As an employee at Amazon, having seen a few acquisitions, they tend to not gut them, they tend to incorporate them into the fold. They seem to assimilate in the employees fairly gracefully.

I find it slightly ironic that this site requires JS to display any content at all.

Nothing less is expected from the desperate gang called Amazon.

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