AF Holdings, LLC v. Doe, 2012 WL 3835102 (N.D. Cal., September 4, 2012)
Copyright troll plaintiff AF Holdings sued defendant for, among other things, negligence for failing to secure his home wi-fi network. Plaintiff argued that defendant’s inaction allowed a third-party to commit large-scale infringement of AF Holdings’ copyrighted works.
Defendant moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The court granted the motion and dismissed the negligence claim.
It held that a defendant like the one in this case had no duty to protect another from harm in this situation of “non-feasance” (i.e, failing to do something) unless a special relationship existed which would give rise to such duty. In law school this principal is articulated through the hypothetical of standing on a lakeshore watching someone drowning — you don’t have to jump in to save the person unless you are a lifeguard (or the victim’s parent, or a member of some other very limited class).
The court found that no special relationship existed here, thus plaintiff had not articulated any basis for imposing on defendant a legal duty to prevent the infringement of plaintiff’s copyrighted works.
We talked about this issue, along with other issues like copyright preemption, as it arose in a different case back on Episode 170 of This Week in Law beginning at about the 19 minute 40 second mark: