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.
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…
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
> “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.
> 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.
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+
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
237 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadThat 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.
1. You may be able to file an Anti-SLAPP motion.
2. You could consider filing a complaint with the SEC.
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.
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...
> Amazon served me with a lawsuit.
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.
Actually he would request that payment from California - they are the ones that hired him as an expert witness, not Amazon.
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.
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...
Btw Fuck Amazon
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.
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.
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.
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.
> And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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?
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.
I think that's what was driving when he said "Amazon served me".
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.
What does it mean to 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
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.
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.
“The car was blue.” versus “Well it was dark out and I didn’t have my glasses on but maybe the car was blue.”
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.
* 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.
One more reason to ignore Twitter threads...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Implying the blog had anything to do with it is simply a lie.
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...
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
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
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.
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…
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.
How much of my time do I have to burn for free because someone else is suing someone else, and my name came up?
But like all good legal answers, the specific answer is that “it depends.”
> 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.
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
It's difficult to put any weight in an anonymous comment when it relies solely on credibility.
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.
[0] https://www.edisonlf.com/about
(When I was looking at his original tweet, when I saw "4 years" I immediately googled for California statute of limitations...)
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?
"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."
If a party tries to abuse the discovery process against a third party then the third party can move for sanctions, including costs.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
$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.
Do you have a reference to that tweet? Was it removed, or am I just having a hard time finding it?
https://twitter.com/Molson_Hart/status/1663582603906088961
Can't his lawyer go to the judge and have this stopped?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Haha. You do you, I just can’t imagine any lawyer saying what you’re proposing is a good idea at all.
And you’ll never succeed in bankrupting Amazon.
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.
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.
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?
I cannot imagine getting pulled into court because I recommended someone file in small claims court for $PROBLEM, and didn’t put “IANAL”.
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).
(Also it is fun to add “for external use only” etc disclaimers.)
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.
"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.
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
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.
Penalty range from a slap on the wrist to jail time.
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.
I find it interesting that many lawyers in the US have this POV.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect
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 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.
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.
“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.
(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 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.)
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.
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.
They have some details about it here:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
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'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.