Jonathan Frieden over at E-Commerce Law will be hosting the Independence Day edition of Blawg Review which, in patriotic fashion will be themed “50 Stars of the Blawgosphere.” Go here to make your nominations.
On a related, nostalgic note, hard to believe that it was more than three years ago that Internet Cases hosted Blawg Review 10. John’s turn coming up on July 7 will be number 167!
Boston Duck Tours LP v. Super Duck Tours LLC, —F.3d—, 2008 WL 2444480 (1st Cir. June 18, 2008)
Boston Duck Tours has been providing tours of Boston in amphibian vehicles (called “ducks” but spelled DUKWs) since 1993. After a competitor moved into town in 2007 calling itself Super Duck Tours, Boston Duck Tours filed suit for trademark infringement. The district court enjoined Super Duck from using its mark and logo. Super Duck sought review with the First Circuit Court of Appeals. On appeal, the court reversed.
It held that the lower court erred in finding that the term “duck tour” was not a generic term outside the protection of trademark law. In reaching this decision, the appellate court reviewed evidence of Boston Duck’s own use of the term in a generic sense, including on its website. For example, a sentence read, “[c]ontrary to local belief, the unique idea of a [d]uck [t]our did not originate in Boston.”
The case should serve as a warning to brand owners to ensure (apart from not selecting a generic term in the first place) that they use their marks in a manner that avoids “genericide”.
Kimberlite Corp. v. Does 1-20, No. 08-2147, 2008 WL 2264485 (N.D. Cal. June 2, 2008)
Plaintiff Kimberlite sued a number of anonymous John Doe defendants after it learned that its network and email system had been unlawfully accessed. A few days after filing suit for violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and trespass to chattels under state law, Kimberlite served a subpoena on AT&T, the owner of the IP address from which the unauthorized access originated, seeking to discover who was responsible.
One of the John Doe defendants, pro se, wrote a letter to the court which the court treated as a motion to quash the subpoena. The court denied the motion.
Doe argued that Kimberlite had failed to state a claim under the CFAA. The court rejected that argument, observing that Kimberlite had adequately alleged and had provided preliminary evidence of a CFAA violation. (Doe had not challenged the sufficiency of the trespass to chattels claim.) Kimberlite’s computers were “protected” computers under the CFAA because they were used in interstate and foreign commerce. They were password protected and accessed without authorization by someone from the subject IP address. Kimberlite succeeded in alleging the threshold amount of CFAA damages ($5,000) through an employee declaration describing over 100 hours of investigation and repair following the intrusions.
Doe also argued that Kimberlite had not demonstrated a need to obtain the information that outweighed Doe’s privacy rights under the Cable Communication Policy Act (CCPA). That act prohibits cable operators from disclosing subscriber information unless certain criteria are met.
The court rejected the CCPA argument first by expressing serious doubt that AT&T, as an Internet service provider was a “cable operator” and thus subject to the CCPA. Even if the CCPA did apply, the court found Kimberlite had demonstrated a compelling need for the information sought. It had adequately set forth a cause of action, so discovery of the anonymous parties was proper.
Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., Inc., — F.3d —-, 2008 WL 2440559 (9th Cir. June 18, 2008)
Sergeant Quon’s employer, the City of Ontario, California Police Department, issued him a pager with which he could send and receive text messages. Copies of text messages sent and received using the pager were archived on Arch Wireless’s computer server. The City’s agreement with Arch Wireless allowed for each user to send up to 25,000 characters’ worth of messages a month.
The police department required any employee who went over that monthly limit to pay the overage charges. Quon went over that limit several times and paid the extra fees. After awhile, the department started to investigate Quon, ostensibly to see whether the department should seek to raise the 25,000 monthly character limit. Quon’s supervisor had told him that the department would not review the contents of the messages if he continued to pay for the overages.
But the department acquired transcripts of the messages anyway. Quon sued, alleging violations of the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. §§2701-2711 (SCA) and the Fourth Amendment.
The district court awarded summary judgment to the defendants on the SCA claim, finding that Arch Wireless was a “remote computing service” as defined by the SCA, and thus it was appropriate for Arch Wireless to turn over the contents of the messages to the police department as a “subscriber” to the service.
On the defendants’ summary judgment motion on the Fourth Amendment claim, the district court determined that Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy, but that the question of whether the search of the contents of the messages by the police chief was reasonable should be heard by a jury. That jury found that the search was reasonable because it was to determine the efficacy of the 25,000 character limit (i.e., to determine whether work-related reasons warranted upgrading).
Quon sought review of both the SCA and Fourth Amendment issues with the Ninth Circuit. On appeal, the court reversed the lower court’s holding that the SCA was not violated. As for the Fourth Amendment claim, the appellate court held that the search by the police chief was unreasonable as a matter of law, and that the question should not have even made it to the jury.
On the SCA claim, the court looked to the plain meaning of the statute as well as the legislative history from 1986 to conclude that the lower court’s determination that Arch Wireless was a remote computer service was erroneous. Arch Wireless did not provide “computer storage” nor “processing services.” Although Arch Wireless was storing the messages after transmission, the court held that that function was contemplated as one for an electronic communications service as well, which was more in line with the services Arch Wireless provided. So when Arch Wireless turned over the contents of the messages to the police department, which was merely a subscriber and not “an addressee or intended recipient of such communication[s],” it violated the SCA.
On the Fourth Amendment question, the court concluded that the search was unreasonable as a matter of law because it was unreasonable in its scope. Assuming that the only reason the police chief wanted to check the efficacy of the 25,000 character limit, there would have been less intrusive ways of doing so. Quon could have been asked to count the characters himself, or could have redacted personal messages in connection with an audit.
UMG Recordings v. Augusto, —F.Supp.2d —-, 2008 WL 2390037 (C.D. Cal. June 10, 2008)
Some record companies create promotional CDs that they distribute to music industry insiders before an album is released. These promo CDs bear the following language:
This CD is the property of the record company and is licensed to the intended recipient for personal use only. Acceptance of this CD shall constitute an agreement to comply with the terms of the license. Resale or transfer of possession is not allowed and may be punishable under federal and state laws.
Troy Augusto is not an industry insider, but he bought copies of promo CDs in record stores and online, and he resold those copies on eBay. Record label UMG sent a notice to eBay under eBay’s Verified Rights Owner program (“VeRO”) and got Augusto’s account suspended. UMG also sued Augusto for copyright infringement. Augusto counterclaimed under Section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), claiming that UMG knowingly misrepresented to eBay that the auctions infringed UMG’s copyrights.
Both sides moved for summary judgment on whether Augusto had infringed, and Augusto also moved for summary judgment on the DMCA misrepresentation claim. The court granted Augusto’s motion as it related to infringement, but denied it as to misrepresentation.
The court found that Augusto’s conduct was protected by the first sale doctrine. This principle is codified at 17 U.S.C. §109(a) and provides that “the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under [Title 17 of the United States Code]… is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.” To invoke the first sale doctrine, Augusto had to show that (1) the CDs were lawfully manufactured with UMG’s authorization, (2) UMG transferred title to the CDs, (3) Augusto was the lawful owner of the CDs, and (4) Augusto disposed of, but did not reproduce, the CDs.
In this case, it was undisputed that the CDs were lawfully manufactured by UMG and that Augusto did not reproduce them. The remaining elements, i.e., that UMG transferred title to the CDs and Augusto was the lawful owner of them, hinged on the question of whether the mailing of the CDs to the industry insiders resulted in a transfer of title.
The court found that title to the CDs passed because the language on them did not create a valid license, and the recipients were entitled to treat the CDs as gifts pursuant to the Postal Reorganization Act, 39 U.S.C. §3009.
In determining that the purported license was invalid, the court found that a significant hallmark of a license — an intent to regain possession — was missing. Further, the absence of any recurring benefit to UMG (the recipients were under no obligation to promote the music) suggested the distribution was a mere gift or sale, and not a license.
Moreover, the only benefit to UMG in having the provision enforced as a license would be to restrain trade, which would run contrary to century old Supreme Court precedent.
The court determined that the CDs were, under the Postal Reorganization Act, a gift. Under that act, if one mails unordered merchandise to a consumer without the consumer’s consent, the merchandise may be treated as a gift, and the consumer may dispose of it as he or she sees fit. Despite UMG’s argument to the contrary, the court held that industry insiders receiving the promo CDs were consumers. The court further held (rejecting UMG’s argument) that the Postal Reorganization Act did not apply only to merchandise for which payment was requested.
In rejecting Augusto’s DMCA Section 512(f) claim that UMG misrepresented the fact of infringement when it demanded eBay remove the auctions, the court found that UMG had a subjective good faith belief in its assertions. Under the holding of Rossi v. MPAA, 391 F.3d 1000 (9th Cir. 2004), this subjective good faith belief could not constitute a Section 512(f) misrepresentation.
Ed. note: This is a guest post by Greg Beck, an attorney at Public Citizen in Washington, DC. Greg works on a variety of issues at Public Citizen, mostly involving Internet free speech, anonymity, and intellectual property. He was lead counsel for Mark Nickolas in his challenge to Kentucky’s ban on blogs. [More info…]
Political blogger Mark Nickolas yesterday settled his lawsuit against Kentucky, in which he challenged the state’s policy of blocking blogs on state-owned computers. The settlement provides that Kentucky will no longer target websites for restriction just because they are blogs, and will instead treat them in the same way it treats other websites with similar content. In other words, classifying a website as a “blog” is no longer a good enough reason to ban a site on the state’s computers.
Nickolas is the owner and primary author of BluegrassReport.org, a blog focusing on Kentucky news and politics and specializing in criticism of former Governor Ernie Fletcher. In 2006, the New York Times quoted Nickolas and noted the blog in an article about Fletcher’s indictment on charges of political corruption. The next day, without warning, the state reconfigured its Webwasher filtering software to block all access to blogs on state computers.
Nickolas filed suit and, represented by Public Citizen, raised two primary arguments that the policy was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. First, he argued that the policy was adopted specifically to target his blog and therefore constituted viewpoint discrimination, the worst form of government action under the First Amendment. Aside from the suspicious timing of the policy, Nickolas relied on internal state email showing that, despite public claims to the contrary, the governor’s office had ordered the ban on blogs and had specifically requested that the URL of Nickolas’s site be added to the “blacklist.” Moreover, Nickolas obtained the declaration of the former state official charged with administering the state’s computer systems at the time the policy went into place, who was told that the decision to ban blogs came from “high up” and was designed to hide the decision to ban Nickolas’s site in “a bunch of other stuff.”
Second, Nickolas argued that, even if the ban were not aimed specifically at his site, the state nevertheless violated the First Amendment by singling out blogs for special restrictions while ignoring other sorts of websites with comparable content. State records showed that the number of hits to news and political blogs from state computers was a small fraction of the millions of hits received each day by mainstream news sites like the Lexington Herald-Leader, the New York Times, and CNN.com. The state could offer no rational explanation for its decision to focus solely on blogs while ignoring other websites reporting the same information (especially since even blogs on mainstream news sites remained accessible). Moreover, Kentucky continued to allow access to many other categories of websites that served no work-related purpose and that received more traffic than blogs, including webmail, newsgroups and message boards, sports sites, shopping sites, financial and stock-trading sites, and others.
The case was the first to challenge a state’s decision to block access to blogs on state-owned computers. The most analogous case is the Fourth Circuit’s en banc decision in Urofsky v. Gilmore, where several Virginia professors sued over a law prohibiting access on state computers to sexually explicit materials. 216 F.3d 401 (4th Cir. 2000). The professors asserted that they needed access to the materials to fulfill their research, writing, and teaching responsibilities. That assertion, however, ultimately proved fatal to the professors’ claims when the court held that, because the professors were performing these duties in their capacities as state employees rather than as private citizens speaking on issues of public concern, their First Amendment rights were not implicated. Urofsky‘s reasoning suggests that if the professors had instead relied on restrictions to their personal use of state computers, the court would have evaluated the law’s constitutionality under the Supreme Court’s decision in Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968). Pickering and a line of cases following it established a balancing test for determining the constitutionality of a government’s restrictions on its employees’ speech, weighing the employees’ First Amendment interest in access to the restricted materials against the employer’s interest in maintaining order in the workplace.
Unlike the professors in Urofsky, Nickolas did not challenge the state’s restrictions on what employees could read pursuant to their job-related responsibilities. Kentucky, like many other employers, had long allowed its employees to use state-owned computers for personal as well as work-related purposes as long as that use did not interfere with performance of job responsibilities. Pursuant to Kentucky’s policy, employees could and frequently did read online news sites, including blogs, from workplace computers. The state’s decision to block access to the blogs while still allowing access to other news sites imposed on its employees its own preferences about which sources of news were acceptable and which were not. Nickolas argued that, even if the state had the power to entirely ban personal use of workplace computers (a proposition that Nickolas did not dispute), it did not have the power to selectively allow access to only those news sites it approved as sources of news. It was simply not a proper role for government, Nickolas argued, to decide which websites were legitimate news sites and which were not.
In the settlement finalized yesterday, Kentucky reserved its right to regulate use of computers in the workplace, but agreed to do so in a viewpoint-neutral manner that treats blogs the same as equivalent non-blog websites. Although a decision on the legality of blog-banning policies will be left for another day, the case should at least cause public employers to think twice before cutting their employees off from a large and important piece of the online political discussion.
Toma v. Motley Crue et al., No. 08-3479 (N.D. Ill., Filed June 17, 2008)
The purported owner of the copyright in photos taken of members of Motley Crue way back in 1981 has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleging that the band, Universal Music Group and Singatures Network have committed copyright infringement. [Read the Complaint] Interesting to see UMG, who is frequently on the dishing-it-out side in so many of the file sharing lawsuits now being put in the position of taking it.
The claims in the lawsuit are pretty straightforward, and the complaint is written in typical federal pleading bare bones style. In a nutshell, plaintiff Toma allegedly acquired the copyright in the photos through assignment from the photgrapher, one Michael Pinter (though Toma didn’t seek registration until March of this year). The defendants are alleged to have committed infringement by “publishing and selling” copies of the images.
Toma seeks actual damages plus costs and attorney’s fees (not sure of the basis for an attorney’s fee award given the timing of registration) as well as injunctive relief from any futher infringement.
Ruiz v. Gap, Inc., 540 F.Supp.2d 1121 (N.D. Cal. March 24, 2008)
In 2006, Ruiz applied for a job at the Gap and was required to provide his Social Security number. A vendor hired by the Gap for recruiting stored Ruiz’s information on a laptop which, as luck would have it, was stolen.
Though he was not (at least yet) the victim of identity theft, Ruiz sued the Gap for negligence. The Gap moved for judgment on the pleadings which the court also treated as a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The court denied the motion to dismiss as to negligence (and granted the motion as to claims for bailment, unfair competition and violation of the California constitutional right to privacy). But Ruiz’s standing to bring the claim was tenuous.
The Gap had argued that Ruiz lacked standing. His only alleged harm was that he was at an increased risk for identity theft. The court’s analysis of the Gap’s objection to standing focused on the first element of the Lujan test (Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)), namely, whether Ruiz’s alleged injury was “concrete and particularized.”
The Ninth Circuit has held for allegations of future harm to confer standing, the threat must be credible, and the plaintiff must show that there is a “significant possibility” that future harm will ensue. The Lujan case (which is the leading Supreme Court authority on standing) essentially creates a “benefit of the doubt” for plaintiffs at the pleading stage — a court is to presume that general allegations embrace those specific allegations that are necessary to show a particularized injury. Ruiz’s general allegations of the threat of future harm were thus sufficient to confer standing.
But the court gave a warning to Ruiz that the threshold of standing does not apply only to pleadings, but is an indispensable part of a plaintiff’s case throughout. In other words, he’ll have to come up with more later to keep the case in court.
So in denying the motion to dismiss the negligence claim, the court incorporated its standing analysis. The only issue on the point of negligence was whether Ruiz had suffered an injury. Ruiz’s general allegations were sufficient.
Post on LiveJournal blog in which student referred to administrators by a derogatory name and was intended to incite anger in administration was justification for disqualifying student from participating in upcoming election of class officers.
Doninger v. Niehoff, — F.3d —-, 2008 WL 2220680 (2nd Cir. May 29, 2008)
Toward the end of Avery Doninger’s junior year in high school in 2007, she became quite involved in planning the upcoming “Jamfest,” a battle of the bands held at her high school. After learning that school administrators were likely to postpone Jamfest, Avery collaborated with some of her classmates to raise attention concerning the postponement and to pressure the school administrators to rethink the schedule.
One of Avery’s pressure tactics was to post an entry to her LiveJournal blog in which she referred to the school administrators as “douchebags” and encouraged others to contact the school principal to “piss her off” more. Eventually, administrators discovered the blog post and decided that Avery should not be permitted to run for Senior Class Secretary.
So her mother as guardian and next friend sued the school district alleging violation of Avery’s first amendment rights. She sought injunctive relief, asking the court to either redo the election or give Avery all the rights and privileges of the student that was duly elected as class secretary. The district court denied the preliminary injunction. Avery’s mother sought review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On appeal, the court affirmed the denial of the preliminary injunction.
The Second Circuit held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying the motion for preliminary injunction, though the appellate court’s analysis was a bit different. Applying the standard in the seminal Tinker case (Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969)), the court held that keeping Avery out of the election was permissible. The blog post created a reasonably foreseeable risk of substantial disruption within the school.
The case is unique in that it did not deal with content created at school or under the auspices of the classroom, but rather was created on Avery’s personal time, outside of school, on her own computer. But the “off-campus character” of the posting did “not necessarily insulate [Avery] from school discipline.”
The court found it was reasonably foreseeable that Avery’s post would reach school property because the content directly pertained to school events, its intent was to get students to read and respond, and Avery knew school community members were likely to read the post. Moreover, on the point of substantial disruption, the post contained offensive language, was misleading, and did not comport with the standard of conduct expected of a school government participant.
Other coverage:
Johnson v. Microsoft Corp., No. 06-900, 2008 WL 803124 (W.D. Wash. March 21, 2008).
A number of plaintiffs filed suit against Microsoft in federal court in Washington state, alleging, among other things, that the installation of Windows Genuine Advantage (“WGA”) (which enforces the validity of a user’s version of XP) violated the XP end user license agreement (“EULA”).
Microsoft moved for summary judgment against two of the plaintiffs, arguing that they did not own the computers at the time WGA was installed, and thus these plaintiffs lacked standing. The court agreed and entered summary judgment against these plaintiffs.
The court rejected these plaintiffs’ arguments that they had standing as computer users and business owners to raise the breach of contract claims. The plaintiffs had transferred their ownership to a company before WGA was installed. The parties were therefore not parties to the EULA and lacked privity with any party. Moreover, they could not be treated as third party beneficiaries of the EULA, so they lacked standing.
