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“But last month, Amazon changed the deal. To stream movies and TV shows without ads, Amazon customers must now pay an additional $2.99 per month… This is not fa

• johnnyo 3y ago
  The article mentions the ads are expected to bring in $3 billion annually. Even if the lawsuit is successful, I suspect it will cost Amazon much less than what they are projecting to make.
  • diggan 3y ago
    > Even if the lawsuit is successful, I suspect it will cost Amazon much less than what they are projecting to make. What's the point then? It appears only lawyers stand to gain from this, as usual. As soon as fines and legal infractions are viewed merely as the 'cost of doing business', enforcing regulations becomes futile. At that point, might as well transition to a 'free for all' market rather than maintain a faux judicial system.
    • voakbasda 3y ago
      The point is that fines and legal infractions are the cost of doing business. The government consistently fails to enforce laws in a meaningful way. We are indeed in the midst of a free for all, where "all" here refers to established interests wholly capable of buying legislation and courts.
    • alwaysrunning 3y ago
      > What's the point then? It appears only lawyers stand to gain from this, as usual. "lawyers stand to gain from this"
    • Retric 3y ago
      The point is it heavily discourages this kind of mid subscription bait and switch. Not living in a world where bait and switch / illegal business practices are 10x as common is the benefit of class action lawsuits not the occasional random check for $1.37 or worse a coupon etc. Long term they could have rolled out adds as people resubscribe and there’s no lawsuit, and next time they may consider doing so.
  • thomastjeffery 3y ago
    Users are also harmed by watching the ads. It would be reasonable to calculate the value of each viewed ad as part of the compensation that is sought by a class-action.
    • glitchc 3y ago
      It's hard to show legally that users are harmed by watching ads, tort law requires a clear path to harm. If some users purport some benefit, that would negate the harm claims.
      • mitthrowaway2 3y ago
        Wouldn't one clearcut argument be that many people are willing to pay money specifically to not see ads?
        • robertlagrant 3y ago
          I'm willing to pay money to buy a nice car. That doesn't mean a less nice car would harm me.
          • JohnFen 3y ago
            If you paid money for a nice car and got a less nice car, you suffered financial harm.
          • dylan604 3y ago
            If less nice car doesn't have some of the same safety features like side impact air bags but are then in a t-bone collision where you are injured because the air bags were not there, then yes.
            • robertlagrant 3y ago
              If the nicer car doesn't have air bags then that might harm me more. This is orthoganal.
• dangus 3y ago
  This is exactly what I was going to say. Prime is sold as an annual purchase, and they didn’t structure the deal so that it would kick the ads in when your current term expires.
• init2null 3y ago
  Best case is that they'll be forced to let us cancel with a partial refund. This is a worthy lawsuit for that reason.
  • mikestew 3y ago
    "Forced"? You can already cancel Prime, and get a pro-rated refund.
• silisili 3y ago
  I cannot believe they didn't roll this out as some feature flag based on account signup/renew date, and instead just told all paid members they're now being downgraded(remember, it's not just ads, it's lower quality).
  • eitally 3y ago
    No matter what people think about the products Google has built, they absolutely did handled the subscription, grandfathering and later deprecation of Google Play Music to Youtube Music, and Youtube -> Youtube Red -> Youtube Premium. A subscriber may have lost features, but they definitely did not get upcharged as part of a transition, and only later did Google start raising rates -- separate from forced functional subscription changes.
    • neogodless 3y ago
      Yeah - Google Stadia was actually kind of nice deal for the people that jumped in early.
    • silisili 3y ago
      Absolutely. I'm still mad about going from Play Music to Youtube Music, but I didn't feel cheated. I was also a Stadia subscriber, and while they probably legally didn't have to, they refunded every single penny I spent on games and hardware.
    • ajdude 3y ago
      It's not just Google either, every single pay subscription service I've ever had only altered the price for me on my renewal date (and I've often had year-long or higher subscriptions). Amazon seems to be an outlier.
  • maximus-decimus 3y ago
    > it's not just ads, it's lower quality I didn't know that. I watched an old movie the other day (Whisper 2007). It looked like complete shit and found that strange.
• jmward01 3y ago
  Somewhere in the prime TOS we have agreed to this and likely much worse. I paused my subscription, not that that will mean anything to them. This lawsuit was inevitable and will change absolutely nothing no matter the outcome. The meaningful change we need is actual consumer advocacy and invalidating predatory TOS clauses. It isn't possible to live in the modern world without accepting the ridiculous and predatory TOS attached to everything and that isn't right.
  • vidanay 3y ago
    The lawsuits and settlement budgets were all figured in to their anticipated costs to make this change.
    • seesaw 3y ago
      I canceled in protest. If enough people cancel, that would send a message that people won’t support ads. But I am probably an outlier.
      • michaelbarton 3y ago
        Anecdata, but I and several of my friends have too. It’s a trivial amount of money ($3) but it just really rubbed me up the wrong way and that’s what led to me cancelling.
  • danaris 3y ago
    It's already been established (at least in some jurisdictions...? unclear on the details, I'm afraid) that terms in agreements like a TOS that are too far beyond the pale can, at least, be ruled unconscionable.
• apwell23 3y ago
  > I look forward to the eventual $.32 settlement I receive. Do you know why amount is always ridiculously low. Are these lawsuits primarly for the lawyers to make a buck, I dont see how anyone else would be motivated otherwise.
  • nickff 3y ago
    They have a low chance of success in court, and are a relatively expensive proposition for the plaintiff lawyers pursuing them. As such, the lawyers are happy to take a generous (to them) settlement before the case gets too far. On the opposite side, it helps the company avoid expensive discoveries, low-probability but possibly very expensive judgements, and gets rid of the need to keep investors informed about nuisance suits.
  • Janlopp 3y ago
    [dead]
  • Turing_Machine 3y ago
    That's certainly the usual case, but not always. I recall one Facebook class action check I got that was in the $250 range.
  • kmeisthax 3y ago
    The way a class action lawsuit works is this: You, Big Business Co, do something that injures a bunch of people for a small amount. A lawyer files a lawsuit on behalf of a purported class - i.e. "Everyone Bezos Hurt vs. Amazon". There's a whole thing about class certification and other things I don't have time to get into, but let's say the judge agrees that this is a class whose harms can be adjudicated together. At some point, if you actually have a claim, Amazon wants to pay money for it to go away. This is an accepted part of the legal system, because US courts are adversarial courts[0]. The judge is just the referee. That means that if the plaintiff and defendant agree to take their business elsewhere, the judge can't get involved and continue to prosecute a dead case[1]. First problem: lawyers don't work for free. In fact, pretty much all of them are in massive amounts of student debt until their 40s and 50s, because their ability to command insane amounts of money for their services is priced into the cost of their education. Normally, a lawyer either gets paid by their client, or the client agrees to the lawyer taking a percentage cut of the damage award if one were to exist. Problem is, there's no client yet - we're suing on behalf of an abstract group of people that may or may not want to be involved in the case. Second problem: we don't know who's a member of the class, or even how many people are a member of it. Settlement agreements typically involve cash payments of a fixed amount. You have to divvy that fixed amount up to an unknown number of people. So as a result every class action settlement works like this: first, the lawyer gets a cut of the settlement, then the class splits it up however many ways. People have to respond to a settlement offer in order to be included in the class. If more people sign up than we have money for, however, then the class members are diluted. Amazon's liability does not increase just because they harmed more people than they thought. This is, effectively, a weird kind of double protection racket, in which the person shaking Amazon down for money is also taking money from Amazon to shake them down for less so the mob (us) doesn't get as much. All of it is enabled by fairly understandable and straightforward rules being chained together to arrive at a terrible result. [0] The opposite of this is inquisitorial courts. Inquisitorial as in NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION! [1] There are certain situations in which a judge can object to a settlement that is unfair to the class, but they can't outright demand the case be brought to trial.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  Except that, from all reports online (including someone in these comments), Amazon will cancel your annual Prime subscription and refund all remaining time without any problem. They don't seem to be holding anyone to the contract. (And of course plenty of people subscribe monthly rather than annually as well.) So I'm not sure there's any case here at all? Since even with annual subscriptions, it seems you can cancel at any time and get a prorated refund. The fact is, online subscription services change their benefits/features all the time. And companies seem to handle it two ways: grandfather existing customers for the rest of their subscription period, or offer prorated refunds for people who want to cancel. And while the former is definitely going to make customers happier, I think they're both acceptable from a legal standpoint? So I'm not sure this lawsuit has any chance of succeeding at all.
  • Retric 3y ago
    Simply canceling mid contract isn’t a perfect remedy. Consider, should they get to keep the interest on the money they are handing back to you? Obviously not. Contracts are enforceable because society is much worse off if they aren’t. Imagine if your bank could arbitrarily cancel a car loan and ask for the outstanding balance back at any time simple because they felt like it.
    • throwawaymaths 3y ago
      Enjoy the pennies on your interest.
      • Retric 3y ago
        6 months on 139$ /2 @ 6% is $2.09 not just a few cents. Multiply that by everyone with an annual prime membership and your talking 1/2 billion dollars or so.
        • crazygringo 3y ago
          It's only being multiplied by the number of people who are canceling because of this. If that's 0.1% of 200 million subscribers who cancel, that's about $400K in supposed interest. Not half a billion. A rounding error for Amazon. But interest just doesn't generally factor into small consumer "returns". If you buy shoes online and then return them 25 days later because they don't match the photos exactly, you don't get interest on that either. At these amounts, it's not worth worrying about.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  Assuming a settlment is reached, it would probably require Amazon to stop their practice of charging additional fees in exchange for not harassing customers with ads. That latest internet meme from Cory Doctorow labels this particular form of bait-and-switch as "enshittification". Perhaps the plaintiffs get only a dainty payout as a result of a settlement, but their lawyers will make some decent coin, and that provides the motivation to work to prove Amazon is breaking the law. How much ad revenue does Amazon make per Prime customer on average. Is it more or less than $2.99/month. We might find out the answer to questions like these during discovery. IIRC, in past litigation we learned that Google makes about $5.50/month per user from ads. What is the alternative. Plaintiffs could finance their own lawsuits against Amazon. Perhaps they could recover more than $.32. But how much would they have to spend on legal fees and costs to reach a settlement. Chances are, Mr. Napoleon and the other plaintiffs are not paying anything. People who do not appreciate being harassed by ads by Amazon can engage lawyers to work for them "for free" to stop Amazon from further harassment. Plus, those people might get a check for $.32. What's the alternative. Keep getting harassed by Amazon and complain on HN expecting something will change. That sounds even less effective and more ridiculous than class action lawsuits and $.32 settlement checks.
• Justsignedup 3y ago
  This is why companies do this nonsense. The cost is so low, that its just the cost of doing business. They need an additive punitive damage getting everyone $100. In any case, sensationalist headlines aside, some lawyer is gonna make a lot of money. And I'm guessing the case will be settled so we can't just go to small claims court and sue them for 3k each.