In this long-running dispute that has been previously dubbed “The World Series of IP cases” by the presiding judge, Oracle America Inc. (“Oracle”) accuses Google Inc. (“Google”) of unauthorized use of some of its Java-related copyrights in Google’s Android software platform. Specifically, Oracle alleges that Google infringed the declaring code of certain Java API packages for use in Android, including copying the elaborate taxonomy covering 37 packages that involves multiple classes and methods.  Google had declined to obtain a license from Oracle to use the Java APIs in its platform or license the same under an open source GPL license; instead it copied the declaring code from the 37 Java API packages (over 11,000 lines of code), but wrote its own implementing code.  Google designed it this way, believing that Java application programmers would want to find the same 37 sets of functionalities in the new Android system callable by the same names as used in Java.

In the flurry of deal-making that resulted in a 2,232-page funding bill released Wednesday, lawmakers negotiated the inclusion of “The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act” (often referred to as the “CLOUD Act”) (see page 2,201 of the bill text).  The CLOUD Act provides a procedural structure for law enforcement to pursue the preservation or production of data and other information residing on servers located overseas that is within the possession, custody or control of the provider.

In this age of cloud computing, data can rest overseas or in multiple locations. As we’ve previously discussed, it is increasingly common to see extraterritorial legal disputes arise when parties attempt to apply laws passed before the digital age to our current landscape.

UPDATE: On March 19, 2018, the district court granted the defendant’s motion for certification of the court’s February 15th partial summary judgment decision for interlocutory appeal to the Second Circuit.  In allowing immediate appeal, the court agreed that its prior order “has created tremendous uncertainty for online publishers” and “given the frequency with which embedded images are ‘retweeted,’ the resolution of this legal question has an impact beyond this case.”  We will closely follow the appeal of this important copyright issue.

UPDATE: On July 17, 2018, the Second Circuit denied the petition for interlocutory appeal.

A New York district court recently held that a host of online news publishers and media websites that embedded certain tweets (containing unauthorized uploads of plaintiff’s copyrighted photo) on their websites violated the plaintiff’s exclusive display right, despite the fact that the image at issue was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (i.e., Twitter).  (See Goldman v. Breitbart News Network, LLC, No. 17-03144 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 15, 2018)).  In doing so, the court declined to adopt the Ninth Circuit’s so-called “server test” first espoused in the 2007 Perfect 10 decision, which held that the infringement of the public display right in a photographic image depends, in part, on where the image was hosted.

Under the “server test,” only a server that actually stored the photographs and “serves that electronic information directly to the user (`i.e., physically sending ones and zeroes over the Internet to the user’s browser’) could infringe the copyright holder’s rights.” In its ruling, the Goldman court granted the plaintiff’s motion for partial summary judgment, and determined that the reasoning of the Perfect 10 decision, which applied to a search engine’s image search function and display of full-size images hosted on third-party servers to a user, was not applicable to the embedding practices the media sites engaged in. 

UPDATE: On March 2, 2018, in a related biometric privacy litigation surrounding Tag Suggestions brought by non-users of Facebook, a California district court in a brief order declined to dismiss the action for lack of standing, citing its reasoning in the Patel opinion.  (Gullen v. Facebook, Inc., No. 16-00937 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 2, 2018)). While Facebook offered evidence that it does not store faceprint data on non-users, but only analyzes it to see if there is a match, the court stated such substantive arguments are best left for summary judgment or trial.  Note: the Gullen case is related to the consolidated Facebook biometric privacy litigation and as such, is being heard before the same judge. The difference between the two actions is that Gullen involves non-Facebook users, whereas the plaintiffs in In re Facebook are registered users.

This past week, a California district court again declined Facebook’s motion to dismiss an ongoing litigation involving claims under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 Ill. Comp Stat. 14/1 (“BIPA”), surrounding Tag Suggestions, its facial recognition-based system of photo tagging.  In 2016, the court declined to dismiss the action based upon, among other things, Facebook’s contention that BIPA categorically excludes digital photographs from its scope.  This time around, the court declined to dismiss the plaintiffs’ complaint for lack of standing under the Supreme Court’s 2016 Spokeo decision on the ground that plaintiffs have failed to allege a concrete injury in fact.  (Patel v. Facebook, Inc., No. 15-03747 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 26, 2018) (cases consolidated at In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litig., No. 15-03747 (N.D. Cal.)).  As a result, Facebook will be forced to continue to litigate this action.

This dispute is being closely watched as there are a number of similar pending BIPA suits relating to biometrics and facial recognition  and other defendants are looking at which of Facebook’s defenses might hold sway with a court. 

UPDATE:  On February 22, 2018, the district court granted 3taps’s motion to relate its action to the ongoing hiQ v. LinkedIn litigation. This motion was based upon a local Northern District of California rule that holds that cases should be related when the actions concern substantially the same parties, transaction or event, and there would be an “unduly burdensome duplication of labor…or conflicting results” if the cases were heard before different judges.  As a result, the 3taps case, over the opposition of LinkedIn, was reassigned to Judge Edward Chen, who also presided over the lower court proceedings in the hiQ v. LinkedIn litigation.

In the latest development in the legal controversy over scraping, 3taps, Inc. (“3taps”), a data aggregator and “exchange platform” for developers, filed suit against LinkedIn seeking a declaratory judgment that 3taps would not be in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) if it accesses and collects publicly-available data from LinkedIn’s website. (3Taps Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 18-00855 (C.D. Cal. filed Feb. 8, 2018)).  The basis of 3Taps’s complaint is last year’s hotly-debated California district court ruling (hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn, Corp., 2017 WL 3473663 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 14, 2017)), where the court granted a preliminary injunction compelling LinkedIn to disable any technical measures it had employed to block a data analytics company from scraping the publicly available data on LinkedIn’s website. The hiQ ruling essentially limited the applicability of the CFAA as a tool against the scraping of publicly-available website data.  [For an analysis of the hiQ lower court decision, please read the Client Alert on our website].

A California district court issued an important opinion in a dispute between a ticket sales platform and a ticket broker that employed automated bots to purchase tickets in bulk. (Ticketmaster L.L.C. v. Prestige Entertainment, Inc., No. 17-07232 (C.D. Cal. Jan. 31, 2018)). For those of us who have been following the evolution of the law around the use of automation to scrape websites, this case is interesting. The decision interprets some of the major Ninth Circuit decisions of recent memory on liability for web scraping.  Indeed, two weeks ago, we wrote about a case in which the Ninth Circuit interpreted certain automated downloading practices under the CFAA and CDAFA. Also, we wrote about and are awaiting the decision in the hiQ v. LinkedIn appeal before the Ninth Circuit. Also prior posts on the topic include a discussion of a noteworthy appeals court opinion that examined scraping activity under copyright law and the scope of liability under the DMCA anticircumvention provisions.  These seminal decisions and the issues they raise were expressly or implicitly addressed in the instant case. While we will briefly review some of the highlights of this decision below, the case is a must-read for website operators and entities that engage in web scraping activities.

Facebook recently announced that it would make changes to its news feed to prioritize content that users share and discuss and material from “reputable publishers.”  These changes are part of what Mark Zuckerberg says is a refocusing of Facebook from “helping [users] find relevant content to helping [users] have…

UPDATE: On September 27, 2018, the Supreme Court granted Rimini Street, Inc.’s petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Court to review part of the multi-million dollar damage award against it for costs and resolve an apparent circuit split over whether so-called “non-taxable costs” may be awarded under the Copyright Act (which allows for the recovery of “full costs”).  The question presented is: “Whether the Copyright Act’s allowance of “full costs” (17 U.S.C. § 505) to a prevailing party is limited to taxable costs under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1920 and 1821, as the Eighth and Eleventh Circuits have held, or also authorizes non-taxable costs, as the Ninth Circuit holds.”  On March 4, 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the term “full costs” in §505 of the Copyright Act is limited to the six categories of taxable costs as specified at 28 U.S.C. §§1821 and 1920.

Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit issued a noteworthy ruling in a dispute between an enterprise software licensor and a third-party support provider.  The case is particularly important as it addresses the common practice of using automated means to download information (in this case, software) from websites in contravention of website terms and conditions.  Also, the case examines and interprets fairly “standard” software licensing language in light of evolving business practices in the software industry. (Oracle USA, Inc. v. Rimini Street, Inc., No. 16-16832 (9th Cir. Jan. 8, 2018)).

A Canadian appellate court ruled that a lower court had jurisdictional authority to issue a production order to craigslist based upon its virtual (but not physical) presence in British Columbia. The production order requested that Craigslist produce to Canadian officials documents relating to a user post in connection with a criminal investigation. (British Columbia (Attorney General) v. Brecknell, 2018 BCCA 5 (Jan. 9, 2018)).

This decision highlights another situation where a court blurred the distinction between a physical and virtual presence of a corporation that engages in global e-commerce.  Indeed, we had written about an important Canadian decision last year that involved an American company objecting to an order to delist certain search results globally.  With U.S. companies already concerned about the territorial scope of the EU’s GDPR, they also have to address legal risks associated with jurisdiction by a virtual presence north of the border (and possibly other jurisdictions). 

In a blog post last month, Google announced that it would extend certain commitments it made to the FTC in 2012 that were set to expire relating to, among other things,  the scraping of third-party content for use on certain Google “vertical search” properties such as Google Shopping.  The announcement came days before the commitments were set to expire on December 27th and months after Yelp had claimed that Google was not living up to its promises by allegedly scraping Yelp local business photos for use in certain Google results (e.g., local business listings).