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Ninth Circuit Upholds Injunction Barring Access to a Website |
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Geist/BNA today points to a great little Ninth Circuit case about unfair competition in the age of the Internet. I was fairly scared when I read that the Ninth Circuit had upheld an injunction barring one party from accessing an otherwise publicly-accessible website. But when I finished reading the case, things seemed much more reasonable.
Creative Computing, Inc. v. Getloaded.com pits two trucker-oriented websites against each other. Creative Computing's Truckstop.com is an online marketplace that helps truckers and shippers link up with each other. It was the first such and quickly became wildly popular. Getloaded.com, is, if Judge Kleinfeld's opinion is to be believed, a low-down rip-off, built on a systematic policy of fraud and dirty tricks. Getloaded hired away employees from Creative and had them bring source code and customer lists with them; it also hacked into Creative's servers (Creative was using an unpatched Microsoft system, tsk tsk) and also stole the password of a Creative customer in order to get a closer look at the site's functionality.
The district court saw the case through to a jury verdict against Getloaded. It also issued an injunction during the trial to prevent Getloaded from accessing truckstop.com, given that one of the major claims at stake was "unauthorized access" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But Getloaded -- although it had stipulated to the injunction -- lied to the court and kept on logging into truckstop.com to continue its "research." It was against this contempt-laden backdrop that the Ninth Circuit considered the scope of the district judge's permanent injunction barring Getloaded from ever accessing truckstop.com. Recognizing that the injunction was "extraordinarily broad," the Ninth Circuit nevertheless upheld it, saying:
Getloaded is in a position analogous to one who
has repeatedly shoplifted from a particular store, so the judge
prohibits him from entering it again, saving the store’s security
guards from the burden of having to follow him around
whenever he is there.
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