Plaintiff sued its former employee and alleged, among other things, that defendant violated the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 USC 1201). While defendant was still an employee, she used her username and password to access and download copyrighted material stored on plaintiff’s server after she had already accepted an employment offer from a competitor.
Defendant moved to dismiss the anticircumvention claim. The court granted the motion to dismiss.
The court’s holding centered on what the DMCA means by “circumvent a technological measure”. The statute requires that for there to be circumvention, one must “descramble a scrambled work . . . decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise . . . avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner.”
In this case, the court followed the line of reasoning in prior cases, including Egilman v. Keller & Heckman LLP to hold that defendant did not circumvent any measures because she validly accessed the system using her username and password.
The court found that even if the use that defendant made of that access was not something that plaintiff would have authorized her to do, i.e. copy the materials at issue, defendant’s alleged abuse of her logon privileges did not rise to the level of descrambling, decrypting, or otherwise avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or impairing anything.
R. Christopher Goodwin & Assoc., Inc. v. Search, Inc., 2019 WL 5576834 (E.D. Louisiana October 29, 2019)
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.