Plaintiffs Say They Suffered ‘Injury’ From ‘Mislabeled’ Amazon Content
A “reasonable consumer” understands that when buying something, “they own it unless or until they return it or otherwise dispose of it” but not so with content purchased from Amazon Prime Video. So asserted eight California and New York plaintiffs in their opposition Friday (docket 2:22-cv-00401) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle to Amazon’s motion to dismiss their class action for failure to state a claim.
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When the plaintiffs click the Buy button and buy videos from Amazon, “they get less than they bargained for,” said their opposition. Instead of acquiring the right to watch the purchased content indefinitely, as Amazon “represents repeatedly,” they obtain only a limited license to view content “that Amazon can revoke at any time for any reason,” it said. Plaintiffs and the proposed class members are “injured by paying Amazon more for videos than they would have” if Amazon had “clearly disclosed” that a customer’s purchased content “may disappear at any time,” it said.
Amazon’s argument in its motion to dismiss that the plaintiffs can establish an injury only if their purchased content “has already disappeared” ignores the plaintiffs’ “theory of the case,” said their opposition. The plaintiffs assert the content is “mislabeled” as content the consumer can buy, “rather than that it is defective, because it may disappear from a customer’s account,” it said.
The plaintiffs intend to show, through their own testimony and expert testimony, that when they clicked Buy, “they understood they were purchasing the ability to view a video indefinitely and paid a price premium based on that understanding,” said their opposition. “Had they known the videos could disappear, they would not have bought them or would have paid less for them.” At the pleading stage, all that plaintiffs need allege to establish injury “is that they paid Amazon to purchase at least one video,” it said.
Case law shows an “injury-in-fact” can occur when plaintiffs allege they spent money that, absent the defendant’s actions, they wouldn't have spent, said the opposition. “That is the very injury” that plaintiffs allege, it said. They suffered that injury when they paid Amazon money to buy digital content, “not when any such content disappeared from their accounts or disappears in the future,” it said.
The plaintiffs were injured when they paid Amazon a "premium" to buy content but "received only a revocable license to the content," said the opposition. Their injuries "are neither speculative nor dependent on some future event," it said.
Whether the content ever disappears or not, or whether there is ever even a risk of losing it, "is a red herring planted by Amazon to obfuscate the truth at hand," said the opposition. Unlike "legitimate resellers" that purchase video content from movie houses for sale to consumers, Amazon instead licenses such content from its owners, most likely for pennies on the dollar, and then sells it "for the full suggested retail price (sometimes charging even more for it than resellers that actually pass title over the content to consumers)," it said.