Amazon Prime Plaintiffs Cite Apple Decision as Supplemental Authority

The seven plaintiffs who allege they were duped into buying Amazon Prime content only to learn later that Amazon could revoke availability of the content any time filed as supplemental authority the decision in McTyere et al v. Apple in support of their efforts to defeat Amazon’s motion to dismiss their own claims, said their notice Tuesday (docket 2:22-cv-00401) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington. In McTyere, in which Apple sought dismissal for failure to state a claim, two plaintiffs allege they bought content from the iTunes store, only to find it later disappeared from their purchase folders. Apple argued its statements about content procured from the iTunes store weren’t misleading and, regardless, the plaintiffs didn’t allege they were injured by those statements. “Drawing every inference” in the plaintiffs’ favor, “as it must at this stage of the case, this Court disagrees,” said an order signed Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo for Western New York in Buffalo. Since the McTyere plaintiffs received the “right to the use” of the digital content at issue in their complaint, Apple asserts its advertising wasn’t misleading “regardless of whether their ability to access that digital content later disappeared,” said Vilardo’s order. But Apple’s “right to the use” argument “cannot carry the water that Apple asks it to carry,” it said. “This Court therefore concludes that reasonable consumers might have been misled when they purchased digital content with the mistaken impression that the content could not later be removed from their libraries.”