Amazon Puts A New Limit On How & Who You Can Share Prime Benefits With

(Alan Rappa)

Amazon appears to be reining in the number of people who share some of their Prime member benefits with others. In a rather stealth move over the weekend, the e-commerce giant reduced the number of people that could share a Prime member’s perks from four to just one other member of their household.

Consumerist reader V. pointed our attention to the the e-retailer’s quietly updated provision under the “Amazon Household” policy, which outlines how users can share content and other services from the company with others.

“Their ‘new’ sharing plan is Amazon Households, and is focused on sharing content, but the free prime shipping that could be split with (four) different family members at different addresses is GONE, with no notice,” V wrote.

Under the new provision, certain benefits that come with the $99/year Prime membership can only be shared between the two adults in a household. Those extras include: free two-day shipping, Prime Instant Video, Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and Prime Early Access.

Prior to the weekend change, as V points out, Prime members were allowed to share their membership perks with up to four other people. According to ecommercebytes.com, the previous provision read:

“Free or paid Amazon Prime members can share their shipping benefits with up to four additional family members living in the same household. If you purchase a Prime membership for a small business, you may invite up to four co-workers to shop with this corporate account.”

Prime members who chose to add people to their accounts simply had to record the person’s name, relationship, birthday and email address. The non-member would then receive an invitation, which required them to provide the account holder’s birthday.

While the old policy did stipulate that non-members added to Prime accounts live in the same household, there really was no way to ensure that was the case.

Amazon’s recent changes aren’t so apathetic. Instead of simply confirming that you know the Prime account holder by punching in their birth month and day, both parties must now authorize the other to use their credit cards on the site, which means, theoretically, you won’t just be handing over your Prime benefits to anyone.

“In order to share content, Prime benefits, and Amazon Mom benefits, both adult account holders need to authorize each other to use credit and debit cards associated with their Amazon accounts for purchases on Amazon. This will not affect either of their current payment settings, but each adult will be able to copy the credit and debit cards of the other account to his or her Amazon account and use them for purchases with Amazon.”

While the changes certainly may make Prime seem a little less useful for some households, not all is lost for long-time members.

Android Police reports that those who have already shared their Prime account with more than one person are grandfathered in. The only way you’ll lose the ability to share with someone already in the system is if you manually deactivated an account.

[via ecommercebytes, Android Police]

City Sues Resident Who Used City Council Footage In YouTube Videos

Section 107 of the Copyright Act permits “fair use” of copyrighted materials “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching…, scholarship, or research.” But the leaders of one California city don’t think this applies to critical videos made using footage from its city council meetings.

Earlier this year, the City of Inglewood in Los Angeles County sued a YouTube user after he uploaded videos that criticize Mayor James Butts and others.

The clips utilize video from Inglewood city council meetings to illustrate his issues, but the lawsuit [PDF] alleges that the YouTuber violated Inglewood’s copyright and that the city “has suffered, and will continue to suffer, irreparable harm and damages” as a a result.

The city claims that the YouTube videos made from the copyrighted council footage do not fall under the fair use exception because they “have no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition.”

However, all three of the videos we looked at from this account directly critiqued or reported on what was being shown in the council footage. We’re not lawyers — and we certainly don’t know enough about Inglewood politics to comment on the accuracy of what’s alleged in the YouTube videos — but this sort of direct criticism is generally considered by news media to be fair use.

And we’re not alone in coming to this conclusion.

“When you are taking somebody else’s material, not just to reproduce it but to comment on it and criticize it and sometimes to parody it … that is generally fair use,” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh tells the L.A. Times.

The YouTuber says he started making the videos after he says the police chose to not investigate a drive-by shooting he’d witnessed. He tells the Times that the city denied the existence of his 9-1-1 calls until after he was able to get them to produce the tapes.

“If I take these tapes, and I compare them to what they’re saying in the video of the meetings, it would be clear that they are blatantly lying,” he explains. “That’s when I started thinking about making videos…. I’ve got the time, so I’m just going to start documenting this.”

The man’s lawyer has asked the court to dismiss the copyright suit and ruling is expected soon.

Trade Dispute About Dental Devices Could End Up Changing The Future Of The Entire Internet

(frankieleon)

The entire future of the internet may now depend on some plastic retainers. Specifically, two competing versions of those clear plastic alignment systems adults sometimes get instead of braces. And if that sounds weird — which to be fair, it really is — well, welcome to the strange, utterly pervasive world of IP law in a digital century.

The Wall Street Journal explains where this particular strange test case for regulation came from. It all stems from a question of international trade and digital transmissions originating overseas.

Here’s the background: there are two companies in a trade dispute over orthodontic devices. The products are InvisAlign, which you’ve probably heard of, and ClearCorrect, a competitor that you may not have.

Align Technology, the company behind InvisAlign, holds some patents on the technology. The International Trade Commission found that ClearCorrect was infringing on some of Align’s patents when they made their own teeth-alignment devices, and ordered ClearCorrect to stop. That’s pretty straightforward; it’s what the ITC does. One of the agency’s major purposes is to stop IP-infringing stuff — including counterfeit and knockoff goods, and items that infringe on patents or trademarks — from coming into the U.S.

Except ClearCorrect, a Texas-based company, wasn’t importing the actual plastic devices from overseas. They were importing digital information from overseas. Their process starts by scanning a patient’s teeth, here in the U.S. Then that digital file is sent to technicians in Pakistan who create more digital models, for the steps between crooked teeth and straight ones. Those digital models — just files — then get zapped back across to Texas, where ClearCorrect feeds the models into a 3D printer. Voila: retainers.

To the ITC, however, importing the digital infringing articles worked out to the same end as importing the physical infringing articles, and so in 2012 (PDF) they told ClearCorrect to stop.

The action by the ITC marked the first time the agency had intervened to take action against virtual, rather than physical, infringing material. As you might guess, that decision has resulted in a whole lot of pushback. ClearCorrect appealed the decision, and both sides are being joined by a wide array of internet, tech, consumer, and privacy groups.

The key issue everyone else is worked up about has nothing to do with dentistry, orthodontics, or even patents but everything to do with copyright, software, networks, piracy, and precedent. In short: if a trade regulatory agency can go after companies that send IP-infringing files zipping around the world, that opens up a whole new Pandora’s box of potential woe.

To trade groups like the MPAA and RIAA, the ITC’s move is a great idea. It gives them a new tool in the regulatory toolbox that would let them shut down pirated music, movies, and other media that come in from sites hosted outside of the United States. A senior attorney for the MPAA told the WSJ that the ITC’s approach “matches up well with some of our current problems,” and added that if the commission “is limited to just physical goods, the ITC will end up in the historical dustbin because everything these days is moving toward electronic importation.”

Groups that represent internet businesses and individuals, however, are much more concerned. The Internet Association, which represents basically every top-tier internet business you’ve ever heard of, filed a brief in the case (PDF) arguing that the ITC’s stance was dangerous overreach. At the time the brief was filed, Abigail Slater, the organization’s VP of Legal and Regulatory Policy, said, “This landmark patent law case has enormous implications for cloud computing, the free flow of information between countries and the future of a free and open Internet. … We believe the Commission’s position is unlawful, unenforceable, and harmful to global Internet commerce.”

Advocacy groups Public Knowledge and the EFF also filed a brief arguing that treating digital files as imported articles could have further harms. “The decision to treat digital data as an article of importation raises the question of whether all telecommunications, including phone calls, audio streams and television broadcasts, are also articles of importation,” Charles Duan, Director of the Patent Reform Project at Public Knowledge, said of their filing.

He added, “Additionally, we must now ask if internet service providers, telecommunication companies, or even individual internet users can be summoned before the ITC. Unless the Federal Circuit rejects the ITC’s overboard and incorrect decision, these questions may plague the courts and the public for years to come.”

It’s not hard to see why the ITC made the initial judgement it did about ClearCorrect. The line between digital and physical content grows more blurred every day, and it’s now possible for anyone with a 3D printer, anywhere in the world, to print out basically anything from a file generated anywhere else in the world. Patent-infringing and counterfeit goods are only going to get easier to make and distribute as more and more items have their full plans scanned into a computer somewhere, and it’s the ITC’s job to try to stop that.

But it’s also easy to see how dangerous a precedent may be set if the appeals court agrees. The movie and recording industries are not known for restraint when it comes to throwing every kitchen sink they can find at anyone they even suspect of getting a $5 movie or a 3-minute song for free — regardless of how much other damage it could cause to the entire rest of the internet.

Either way, it will be months yet before we know how this will play out: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hear arguments in the case in Washington, D.C. on August 11.

Imports of Digital Goods Face Test [Wall Street Journal]

Stop & Shop Thinks You Might Like To Chow Down On A Nice, Crunchy Scrubbing Loofah

Either there’s a bit of confusion going on at a Massachusetts Stop & Shop, or these fruits have been left out way too long, completing their transformation from edibles to hygienic tools.

Consumerist reader Jack sent in the above photo featuring a selection of scrubbing loofahs in the produce section next to jicama and bananas, advertised as “Loufah” for $3.99.

“Pluck this gourd before it full ripens and add it to curry soup and stir fry,” the helpful description in the display suggests, while the tag on the item itself designates its category as “cleaning rags.”

The confusion: These bath tools come from a plant known as “luffa,” a vine fruit related to the cucumber. A luffa will turn into what we call a loofah if the fruit isn’t harvested when it’s young. Once it’s fully ripe and dries out, it turns very fibrous, and can be used as the kind of scrubbing sponge you might have in your bathroom or even kitchen right now.

Stop & Shop might take a while to catch on.

“I didn’t bring it to anyone’s attention,” Jack writes, “but I did return to the store the next day and found that the display was still up and stocked.”

Sears Holdings Comparable-Store Sales Down More Than 10% In Last 3 Months

In all of our reporting on the recent woes of Sears Holdings, the real message is that we want Sears to stage a comeback and return to the retail greatness of decades past. Yet things don’t look very promising over at Sears HQ, and today the department store chain announced that its sales across comparable stores have fallen more than 10% in the last quarter.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The company has been quietly closing underperforming Sears and Kmart stores across the country here and there, and the point of shuttering stores is to lose less money and to maybe recapture some of that business by getting shoppers to visit surrounding stores or shop online.

Instead, Sears Holdings reports that sales are down across its Sears and Kmart stores, with a 6.9% decrease at Kmart and a 13.9% decrease in Sears stores. A partial explanation, the company says, is in its consumer electronics business, or maybe we should say their failure to sell consumer electronics. The company describes that whole category as a “business we are altering to meet the changing needs of our members,” and points out that not counting decreased sales in consumer electronics, comparable-store sales only fell 9%.

The sales decrease is about the same as last quarter, though. Either the brilliant turnaround plan for Sears isn’t working as well as anticipated, or it’s just taking a lot longer than shareholders would expect.

Sears Holdings Provides Update On Anticipated Financial Performance; Announces Cash Tender Offer For Up To $1 Billion Principal Amount Of Its Outstanding 6 5/8% Senior Secured Notes Due 2018 [Sears Holdings]

This Graph May Explain Why Cable Companies Aren’t Rushing To Get Into Standalone Streaming

With pay-TV subscription numbers dropping as people turn to online sources for their entertainment and news, it might seem sensidble that the pay-TV giants would jump into the streaming video business. But with the exception of Dish-owned Sling TV, that hasn’t been the case. That might be because consumers appear to be quite fickle about their use of these standalone services.

A recent report from Parks Associates finds a significant level of customer turnover for most streaming, or over the top [OTT], services.

Netflix, which has the highest level of customer loyalty in the group, still saw about 9% of its customers cancel in the last year, according to Parks. The turnover at Amazon Prime cancellations was much higher, at around 30%. Meanwhile, the churn for Hulu’s premium tier (formerly called Hulu Plus) was about half the customer base.

For the smaller services, the turnover rate is up around 60% as customers dip their toes in and out.

“The high churn rate for many of these services suggests that consumers are holding onto their Netflix account while experimenting with the wide variety of other video subscription options,” said Brett Sappington, Director, Research, Parks Associates.

Thus, pay-TV providers — many of whom have little or no competition in their local markets and who often lock new customers in with multiyear contracts — may be reluctant to get into a business where they are constantly having to chase new subscribers to replace defecting ones. It’s easier for cable operators to focus on retaining their broadband customers who need Internet connections to access Netflix and the others.

“These video services are relatively low cost, so consumers can easily experiment with different services to find the ones that best suit their interests,” explains Parks’ research analyst Glenn Hower. “At the same time, they can quickly consume the most interesting content within a service and move on.”

Comcast recently announced a standalone streaming service, cleverly dubbed “Stream,” but unlike Sling TV — which provides live online access to around 20 cable channels — Stream is effectively HBO Now with an assortment of freely available over-the-air stations. Additionally, Stream is only available to Comcast broadband subscribers and only people who live within the company’s cable footprint.

Macy’s, Bloomingdales Expand Same-Day Delivery Service To Nine Markets

(Mike Mozart)

Nearly a year after Macy’s and Bloomingdales began a pilot program offering same-day delivery of certain items for a $5 fee in eight markets around the country, the companies have expanded the service to nine other locations. Markets added to the program include Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Miami/Fort Lauderdale, New York City/Western Long Island, Orange County, CA, and Philadelphia. However, availability for delivery – which is provided by Deliv – varies depending on what stores are located in the area. For example, Dallas and Las Vegas only offer delivery from Macy’s stores, not Bloomingdales. [via Macy’s]