Amazon.com
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Amazon was August 2007 gained attention after a dog fighting case involving NFL quarterback Michael Vick. In May 2008, Marburger Publishing agreed to settle with the Humane Society by requesting that Amazon stop selling their magazine, The Game Cock. The second magazine named in the lawsuit, The Feathered Warrior, remained available. In April 2009 it was publicized that some erotic, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, feminist and politically liberal books were being excluded from Amazon's sales rankings. Various books and media were flagged as "Adult content," including children's books, self-help books, non-fiction, and non-explicit fiction. As a result, works by established authors E. M. Forster, Gore Vidal, Jeanette Winterson and D. H. Lawrence were unranked. The change first received publicity on the blog of author Mark R. Probst, who reproduced an e-mail from Amazon describing a policy of de-ranking "adult" material. However, Amazon later said that there was no policy of de-ranking LGBT material and blamed the change first on a "glitch" and then on "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" that had affected 57,310 books. In September 2009 it emerged that Amazon was selling MP3 music downloads falsely suggesting a well-known Premier League football manager was a child sex offender. Despite a campaign urging the retailer to withdraw the item, they refused to do so, citing freedom of speech. The company was then forced to withdraw the item when legal action was threatened. However, they continued to sell the item on their American, German and French websites.
Amazon has been criticized for its refusal to collect sales taxes from customers in states in which it does not have a physical presence, thus giving it a comparative advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers. Such customers should pay the equivalent amount in use tax directly to their state, however in few customers do so. In 2008 New York passed a law that would force online retailers to collect sales taxes on shipments to New York State residents. Shortly after the law was signed, Amazon.com filed a complaint in the New York Supreme Court objecting to the law. The complaint wasn't based on whether instate customers should pay tax, but upon the long-standing practice of it being the responsibility of the customer to report the sales tax (known as use tax in this case) and not that of the out-of-state businesses. The lawsuit was tossed out of court in January, 2009, when New York State Supreme Court Justice Eileen Bransten stated "there is no basis upon which Amazon can prevail." Amazon has created subsidiaries that are treated separately for tax matters, a legal technique called "entity isolation". The subsidiary that developed the Kindle is in California, but because it doesn't sell the Kindle directly to customers, Amazon's legal position is that it isn't required to collect sales taxes in California. In the company's financial report for the quarter ending September 30, 2009, the company stated that the imposition of sales-tax collection by more states or Congress could "decrease our future sales."
Collection of sales tax