Company could not argue it was not bound by competitor’s browsewrap agreement, because it used a browsewrap agreement for its own website.
Oilpro filed a counterclaim for breach of contract against its competitor, DHI, arguing that DHI breached the agreement it had with Oilpro – such agreement being in a browsewrap agreement found on Oilpro’s website – to not scrape, crawl, or use other automated means to download data from Oilpro’s website. DHI moved to dismiss the breach of contract claim, arguing that Oilpro had insufficiently pled that DHI assented to the terms of the browsewrap agreement. The court denied the motion to dismiss.
In browsewrap cases, because there is no affirmative step to acknowledge assent to the agreement, the party claiming breach has to show that a valid contract exists by demonstrating that the breaching party had actual or constructive knowledge of the terms and conditions. Just having a link to the terms at the bottom of the page, or having them available for review (without having to affirmatively click on something) may not be enough (though there are exceptions to this).
Here, the court found that Oilpro was not relying only on the fact that the agreement was on the pages of the website and available. Instead, Oilpro pointed to DHI’s own web design practices to support its knowledge of the terms of the browsewrap agreement. In the court’s words:
Oilpro alleges constructive notice because DHI has a similar site with a similar browsewrap agreement. Thus, even if there are no allegations that DHI took affirmative action to acknowledge assent, the court finds that the allegations relating to DHI’s constructive knowledge provide more than that the agreement was available and raise the claim to plausible.
So the case stands for the proposition that a company that uses a browsewrap agreement on its own website is less likely to be able to argue it is unaware of other companies’ browsewrap agreements. Said another way, browsewrap-using companies may have a higher standard of diligence in their own online dealings.
It should be noted, however, that the conclusion in this case is likely to apply only in the B2B context, and will likely not affect the enforceability (or non-enforceability) of browsewrap agreements in consumer context. The court said “[t]his conclusion is confined, of course, to instances where both parties are sophisticated businesses that use browsewrap agreements on their websites.”
DHI Group, Inc. v. Kent et al., 2017 WL 4837730 (S.D. Texas, October 26, 2017).
Photo courtesy Flickr user Patrick Finnegan under this Creative Commons license.
About the Author: Evan Brown is a Chicago technology and intellectual property attorney. Call Evan at (630) 362-7237, send email to ebrown [at] internetcases.com, or follow him on Twitter @internetcases. Read Evan’s other blog, UDRP Tracker, for information about domain name disputes.