}}
Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc. is a lawsuit brought by Facebook in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that Power Ventures Inc., a third-party platform, collected user information from Facebook and displayed it on their own website. Facebook claimed violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA"), and the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. According to Facebook, Power Ventures Inc. made copies of Facebook's website during the process of extracting user information. Facebook argued that this process causes both direct and indirect copyright infringement. In addition, Facebook alleged this process constitutes a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). Finally, Facebook also asserted claims of both state and federal trademark infringement, as well as a claim under California's Unfair Competition Law ("UCL").
Background
Power Ventures previously operated the domain power.com and used it to create a website that enabled its users to aggregate data about themselves that is otherwise spread across various social networking sites and messaging services, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Myspace, and AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. This aggregation method is embodied in its motto: "all your friends in just one place". Power Ventures wanted to provide a single site for its customers to see all of their friends, to view their status updates or profile pages, and to send messages to multiple friends on multiple sites.
The litigation focuses on Power Ventures alleged "scraping" of content for and from users on Facebook into Power Ventures interface. Facebook sued claiming violations of copyright, DMCA, CAN-SPAM, and CFAA.
Power Ventures and Facebook tried unsuccessfully to work out a deal that allowed Power Ventures to access Facebook's site, through Facebook Connect. In late December 2008, Power Ventures informed Facebook that it would continue to operate without using Facebook Connect. Power Ventures allegedly continued to "scrape" Facebook's website, despite technological security measures to block such access.
Opinion of the Court
Facebook sued Power Ventures Inc. in the Northern District of California. The court's ruling addressed a motion to dismiss the copyright, DMCA, trademark, and UCL claims.
Legal standard
When a court considers a motion to dismiss, it must take the allegations in the Plaintiff's complaint as true and construe the Complaint in a manner that is favorable to the Plaintiff. Thus, for a motion to dismiss to succeed, the complaint must lack either a cognizable legal theory or sufficient facts to support the legal theory.
Copyright infringement
To state a claim for copyright infringement, a plaintiff need only allege
Ownership of a valid copyright and
Copying of original elements of the work.
The First Amended Complaint ("FAC") alleged that Power Ventures accessed Facebook's website and made unauthorized "cache" copies of it or created derivative works derived from the Facebook website. However, Power Ventures contended that Facebook's copyright allegations are deficient because it is unclear which portions of Facebook's website are alleged to have been copied. Facebook argued that it need not define the exact contours of the protected material because copyright claims do not require particularized allegations. Since Facebook owns the copyright to any page within its system (including the material located on those pages besides user content, such as graphics, video and sound files), Power Ventures only has to access and copy one page to commit copyright infringement.
Facebook conceded that it did not have any proprietary rights in its users' information. Power Ventures users, who own the rights to the information sought, have expressly given them permission to gather this information.
Judge Fogel reasoned that MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. and Ticketmaster LLC v. RMG Techs. Inc. indicated that the scraping of a webpage inherently involves the copying of that webpage into a computer's memory in order to extract the underlying information contained therein. Even though this "copying" is ephemeral and momentary, that it is enough to constitute a "copy" under § 106 of the Copyright Act and therefore infringement. Since Facebook's Terms of Service prohibit scraping (and thus, Facebook has not given any license to third parties or users to do so), the copying happens without permission.