e-commerce – Attorney Evan Brown

February 16, 2017 Contracts

Florida court rules that online seller’s terms and conditions were not enforceable

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Beware the browsewrap.

A Florida state appellate court recently held that an online seller’s terms and conditions, appearing in a “browsewrap” agreement linked-to from the bottom of its web pages, were not enforceable.

Plaintiff, an online purchaser of defendant’s dietary supplements, sued defendant seller over liver damage plaintiff allegedly sustained from the products. Defendant filed a motion with the trial court seeking to enforce an arbitration clause in its online terms and conditions. Plaintiff objected to that motion, arguing that he never agreed to the arbitration clause contained in the browsewrap agreement.

The lower court denied defendant’s motion to compel arbitration, finding that the terms of the browsewrap agreement were not incorporated into the sales agreement. Defendant sought review with the Florida appellate court. On appeal, the court affirmed the denial of the motion to compel.

This was a case of first impression in the Florida state courts.

The court observed that in other jurisdictions, browsewrap agreements have generally been enforced only when the hyperlink to the terms and conditions is conspicuous enough on the web page to place a user on inquiry notice of their terms. (Inquiry notice, simply stated, is, as its name suggests, notice sufficient to make the user aware enough of the terms that their natural inclination is to inquire further as to what the particular terms are.)

The court distinguished this case from the case of Hubbert v. Dell Corp., an Illinois case in which the court found a browse-wrap agreement to be enforceable.

Here, unlike in the Hubbert case, the defendant’s website allowed a purchaser to select a product and proceed to checkout without seeing the hyperlink to the terms and conditions. The website user could complete the purchase without scrolling to the bottom of the page where the link to the terms and conditions appeared.

In this situation the court found that the online seller’s website failed to advise the plaintiff that his purchase was subject to the terms and conditions of the sale, and did not put him on the required inquiry notice of the arbitration provision.

Vitacost.com, Inc. v. McCants, — So.3d — 2017 WL 608531 (Fla.Ct.App. Feb. 15, 2017)

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.

October 23, 2015 Contracts, Evidence

Want your online agreements to be enforceable? Keep good transaction data.

Chicago internet attorney Evan Brown

A recent court decision underscores the importance of building online e-commerce platforms with the ability to reliably gather information about transactions. The case also says some troubling things about open source.

Plaintiff loaned money in exchange for the borrower assigning its accounts receivable to plaintiff. As part of plaintiff’s services, it provided a platform for its borrower to generate and send invoices to the borrower’s customers. The borrower began generating fake invoices, and one of its customers — the defendant in this case — refused to pay. There was a dispute over whether defendant had accepted or rejected the invoices using plaintiff’s invoice platform.

After a trial, the judge ruled in favor of defendant. The court found that the digital data showing whether defendant had accepted or rejected the invoices was unreliable. The court found credible the testimony of one of defendant’s employees that he never clicked “I agree” on the fraudulent invoices. And there was no good database evidence that he had.

Plaintiff sought review with the Court of Appeal of California. On appeal, the court affirmed, agreeing that the data was unreliable, and further commenting on the problematic use of open source software in plaintiff’s online invoice platform.

The court of appeal found that substantial evidence supported the lower court’s findings. Specifically, it agreed with the lower court’s findings that the defendant’s employee never clicked on the “I agree” button to accept the fraudulent invoices. The court also credited the lower court’s finding that the data was unreliable in part because plaintiff’s website was developed from open source code, and that the developer made untested changes to the software on a weekly basis.

The treatment of the open source aspect is perhaps unfortunate. One unfamiliar with open source would read the court’s opinion as an indictment against open source software’s fundamental reliability:

Open source code is problematic because anonymous people on the internet design it, and “holes” are not fixed by vendor updates. Notifications that there are issues with the code may not go out.

The lack of reliability of the data in this case was not due to the fundamental nature of open source. (We know that open source software, e.g., Linux, powers essential core features of the modern internet.) So it is unfortunate that future litigants may look to this case to argue against vendors who use open source solutions. Fortunately, the case is not citable as precendent (many California Court of Appeal cases are not citable). But the court’s negative treatment of the nature of open source is a troubling example of how a judge may be swayed by a technological red herring.

21st Capital Corp. v. Onodi Tooling & Engineering Co., 2015 WL 5943097 (Not officially published, California Court of Appeal, October 13, 2015)

Evan Brown is a Chicago attorney advising enterprises on important aspects of technology law, including software development, technology and content licensing, and general privacy issues.

Photo by Flickr user bookfinch under this Creative Commons license.

December 29, 2014 Contracts

Forum selection clause in browsewrap agreement did not bind parties in bitcoin fraud case

We all know that clickwrap agreements are preferable to browsewrap agreements, assuming, of course, the objective is to establish binding contracts between participants in online transactions. Nonetheless, some online platforms still (try to) rely on browsewrap agreements to establish terms of service. That avoidance of best practices gives us situations like the recent case of Hussein v. Coinabul, LLC, in which a federal court in Illinois refused to enforce a forum selection clause in a “bitcoin to gold marketplace” browsewrap agreement.

Plaintiff alleged that he sent about $175,000 worth of bitcoins to defendants in June 2013, expecting to get gold in return. (Plaintiff alleges he transferred 1,644.54 BTC. The average exchange value in June 2013 was $107.82/BTC. You can get historical bitcoin price data here: http://www.coindesk.com/price) When the gold never arrived, plaintiff sued for fraud.

Defendants moved to dismiss, citing a forum selection clause contained in a browsewrap agreement found on its website. That purported agreement required all disputes to be heard in the state courts of Wyoming, and for Wyoming law to apply. The court denied the motion to dismiss, finding that the browsewrap agreement afforded plaintiff neither actual nor constructive knowledge of its terms and conditions.

The court observed that the hyperlink that directed users to defendants’ Terms of Service was listed among ten other hyperlinks at the bottom of each page. (See this Wayback Machine capture of the website from June 2013).

As for lack of actual knowledge, the court credited plaintiff’s allegations that he did not review or even know of defendants’ Terms of Service when he entered the bitcoin transaction. And there was no evidence to the contrary in the record.

And as for lack of constructive knowledge, the court found that the hyperlink, “buried at the bottom of the webpage – [was] without some additional act of notification, insufficient for the purpose of providing reasonable notice.”

Hussein v. Coinabul, LLC, No. 14-5735, 2014 WL 7261240 (N.D. Ill. December 19, 2014)