Attorney Evan Brown

October 17, 2012 Privacy

Fear of crime exception made recording phone call okay under eavesdropping statute

Carroll v. Merrill Lynch, No. 12-1076 (7th Cir. October 16, 2012)

Late in the evening on Thanksgiving Day 2005, plaintiff called her co-worker at home and started yelling profanities. The co-worker’s wife picked up another phone on the line and, becoming alarmed at the threatening nature of the conversation, began recording the call.

rotary phone

Plaintiff sued under the Illinois eavesdropping statute, 720 ILCS 5/14. Defendants moved for summary judgment, arguing that the recording was covered under the “fear of crime” exception to the statute. The lower court granted the motion for summary judgment and plaintiff sought review with the Seventh Circuit. On appeal, the court affirmed the award of summary judgment.

The Illinois eavesdropping statute prohibits recording a conversation unless all parties consent to the recording. But that general rule is subject to a bunch of exceptions, such as recordings made:

under reasonable suspicion that another party to the conversation is committing, is about to commit, or has committed a criminal offense against the person or a member of his or her immediate household, and there is reason to believe that evidence of the criminal offense may be obtained by the recording

In this case, the court held that the wife had both a subjective and objective belief that the plaintiff would, at minimum, vandalize their home. Since plaintiff introduced no evidence to create a genuine issue of material fact on the question of the wife’s asserted fear of a crime being committed, summary judgment had been properly granted.

Photo courtesy Vincent Van Der Pas under this Creative Commons license.

October 7, 2012 Computer Crime, Employment, Trademarks

No Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violation for taking over former employee’s LinkedIn account

Eagle v. Morgan, 2012 WL 4739436 (E.D.Pa. October 4, 2012)

After plaintiff was fired as an executive, her former employer (using the password known by another employee) took over plaintiff’s LinkedIn account. It kept all of plaintiff’s contacts and recommendations but switched out plaintiff’s name and photo with those of the new CEO.

Plaintiff sued in federal court under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Lanham Act, and a slew of state law claims including identity theft, conversion and tortious interference. The former employer moved for summary judgment on the CFAA and Lanham Act claims. The court granted the motion, but continued to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the state law claims.

On the CFAA claim, the court found that plaintiff failed to show how the taking over over her account gave rise to a cognizable loss under the CFAA. The kinds of losses she tried to prove, e.g., lost future business opportunities and professional reputation, did not pertain to any impairment or damage to a computer or computer system. Moreover, the court found, plaintiff failed to specify or quantify the damages she alleged.

As for the Lanham Act claim, the court found that there was no likelihood of confusion. It noted that “anyone who navigated to [plaintiff’s] LinkedIn account would be met with [the new CEO’s] name, photograph and new position.” Accordingly, there was no effort to “pass off” the new CEO as plaintiff or to otherwise suggest an endorsement or affiliation.

Though it dismissed all the federal claims, the court kept the pending state law claims. The matter had been before the court for over a year, the judge was familiar with the facts and the parties, and dismissing it so soon before trial would not have been fair.

Other coverage by Venkat.

Photo credit: Flickr user smi23le under this Creative Commons license.

September 10, 2012 Contracts

GoDaddy outage reminds us why limitation of liability clauses are important

The legal team at GoDaddy today probably had more than one conversation about Section 13 of the company’s Universal Terms of Service. That Section contains pretty widely used language which limits how badly GoDaddy could get hurt by an epic failure of its system like the one that happened today.

We are conspicuously told that:

IN NO EVENT SHALL Go Daddy, ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, OR AGENTS BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY OTHER PERSON OR ENTITY FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER . . .

Language like this is critical to technology service agreements. Today’s huge blackout illustrates the extent to which GoDaddy would be on the hook if such a limitation were not in place. Thousands of sites were offline for hours, losing uncountable pageviews and ecommerce sales. Holding GoDaddy responsible for those millions of lost dollars (which would be in the categories of indirect, special and consequential damages) could put a company into bankruptcy. GoDaddy would be big enough (probably) to pick up the tab in such a situation once or twice. Smaller enterprises would likely not be as lucky.

This kid is like GoDady inasmuch as he's trying to limit his liability.

To illustrate the effect of limitation of liability clauses, I have often used the example of similar language in Microsoft’s end user license agreement for Office. Because that is there, you cannot go after Microsoft for the business you lose if Word fails on your computer and you miss the deadline for submitting that big proposal. After today we have a new, perhaps more relevant example. GoDaddy would be pretty protected if you claim that you missed out on that million dollar client because your website was down.

So if you were looking for me through my site today, let me know, so I can send a bill for what you would have paid me to GoDaddy. Then again, I guess I’ve already shown why that won’t get paid.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Mikol under this Creative Commons license.

September 7, 2012 Copyright, Litigation

BitTorrent defendant not negligent for failing to secure home Wi-Fi network

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:

September 4, 2012 Electronic Discovery, Litigation, Privacy

Plaintiff has to turn over emotional social media content in employment lawsuit

Court holds that Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace postings relating to plaintiff’s emotional state must be produced in discovery.

Robinson v. Jones Lang LaSalle Americas, Inc., 2012 WL 3763545 (D.Or. August 29, 2012)

Plaintiff sued her former employer for discrimination and emotional distress. In discovery, defendant employer sought from plaintiff all of her social media content that revealed her “emotion, feeling, or mental state,” or related to “events that could be reasonably expected to produce a significant emotion, feeling, or mental state.”

emotional on social media

When plaintiff did not turn over the requested content, defendant filed a motion to compel. The court granted the motion.

The court relied heavily on the case of E.E.O.C. v. Simply Storage Mgmt., LLC, 270 F.R.D. 430 (S.D.Ind. 2010) in ordering plaintiff to produce the requested social media content. The Simply Storage court found that:

It is reasonable to expect severe emotional or mental injury to manifest itself in some [social media] content, and an examination of that content might reveal whether onset occurred, when, and the degree of distress. Further, information that evidences other stressors that could have produced the alleged emotional distress is also relevant.

Consistent with the principles of Simply Storage the court in this case ordered production from plaintiff all social media communications:

that reveal, refer, or relate to any significant emotion, feeling, or mental state allegedly caused by defendant’s conduct;

The production of this category of communications was meant to elicit information establishing the onset, intensity, and cause of emotional distress allegedly suffered by plaintiff because of defendant during the relevant time period.

The court also ordered plaintif to produce all social media materials concerning:

events or communications that could reasonably be expected to produce a significant emotion, feeling, or mental state allegedly caused by defendant’s conduct.

This second category was meant to elicit information establishing the absence of plaintiff’s alleged emotional distress where it reasonably should have been evident (i.e., under the rubric of Simply Storage, on her social media accounts).

The court observed how counsel for the parties plays an important role in the discovery of social media. As the court in Simply Storage recognized, it is an “impossible” job for the court to define the limits of social media discovery with enough precision to satisfy the producing party. To address this impossible situation, it falls to the lawyers to act in good faith to produce required materials, inquire about what has and has not been produced, make the appropriate challenges, and seek revision of the discovery order as appropriate.

Photo courtesy Flickr user xdxd_vs_xdxd under this Creative Commons license.

August 28, 2012 Litigation, Service of Process

Court allows service of complaint and summons via Yahoo email account

U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Com’n v. Rubio, 2012 WL 3614360 (S.D.Fla., August 21, 2012)

The government filed a civil suit against defendant for violation of the federal Commodity Exchange Act and related regulations. Try as it may, the government could not successfully serve the complaint and summons by traditional means. So the government asked the court for leave to file the papers via defendant’s Yahoo email account. The court granted the motion.

email at the beach

During an earlier state investigation, defendand had provided a Yahoo email address while testifying under oath. The government claimed that it had sent several messages to the same account, each time getting a confirmation receipt indicating the message had been read on a Blackberry using the Digicel network. The evidence in the record showed that Digicel is a provider of network services in the Caribbean, Central and South America.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 4(f)(3) authorizes a court to order an alternate method for service to be effected upon defendants located outside the United States, provided that such service (1) is not prohibited by international agreement and (2) is reasonably calculated to give notice to the defendant consistent with its constitutional due process rights.

In evaluating whether email service in this case would run afoul of international law, the court found that the Hague Convention did not apply because defendant’s precise location was not known — the only information in the record was that he was in the Caribbean, Central or South America. The Inter-American Convention on Letters Rogatory did not prohibit email service in this case, as that Convention would not necessarily preclude service by means outside the scope of its terms.

The court found that email service was also reasonably calculated to give notice to defendant, based on the facts in the record. Here, the government showed that the still-active Yahoo email address about which defendant swore under oath was reasonably calculated to give notice of the action against him and an opportunity to respond.

No Fourth Amendment violation when government looked at Facebook profile using friend’s account

U.S. v. Meregildon, — F.Supp.2d —, 2012 WL 3264501 (S.D.N.Y. August 10, 2012)

The government suspected defendant was involved in illegal gang activity and secured the assistance of a cooperating witness who was a Facebook friend of defendant. Viewing defendant’s profile using the friend’s account, the government gathered evidence of probable cause (discussion of past violence, threats, and gang loyalty maintenance) which it used to swear out a search warrant.

Defendant argued that the means by which the government obtained the probable cause evidence – by viewing content protected by defendant’s Facebook privacy settings – violated defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights. The court denied defendant’s motion to suppress.

It held that where Facebook privacy settings allowed viewership of postings by friends, the Government could access them through a friend/cooperating witness without violating the Fourth Amendment. The court compared the scenario to how a person loses his legitimate expectation of privacy when the government records a phone call with the consent of a cooperating witness who participates in the call. It held that defendant’s legitimate expectation of privacy ended when he disseminated posts to his Facebook friends because those friends were then free to use the information however they wanted, including sharing it with the government.

Photo credit: Flickr user Poster Boy NYC under this Creative Commons license.