ConnectU is the firm
that is suing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a separate case.
Its founders claim Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from
them.
A judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of
California said that the Court does have jurisdiction over the case
and that it can proceed.
Facebook is suing Pacific Northwest Software (PNS), PNS employee
Winton Williams and ConnectU over its claims that ConnectU hired
PNS to write software called Importer, which was designed to gain
unauthorised access to address books in Facebook and other social
networking sites.
According to Facebook's suit, other PNS-developed software, the
'Social Butterfly' program, then sent messages to a user's friends
appearing to come from that user inviting them to the rival
ConnectU platform.
Facebook claims that elements of the software were designed
specifically for its platform and to evade detection by it.
PNS and Williams are based in Washington and had wanted the
Court to find that they were outside of its jurisdiction. But in a
ruling that could be critical for e-commerce and internet related
law suits, Judge Richard Seeborg has said that they are within the
Californian Court's jurisdiction.
Previous court rulings said that jurisdiction could be asserted
over someone who lived outside of a jurisdiction if they had
committed an act against someone inside it and knew that the other
party lived inside the court's jurisdiction.
"As the California Supreme Court has observed, however, 'the
so-called internet revolution has spawned a host of new legal
issues as courts have struggled to apply traditional legal
frameworks to this new communication medium'," said Seeborg's
ruling. "This case presents such a new issue."
"Specifically, the internet permits a person to carry out
conduct expressly aimed at a specific person or entity in another
forum that causes harm in that forum without having express
knowledge as to the geographical location of the person or entity
being affected. This phenomena has no readily apparent direct
analog in the pre-internet world," he said.
"Reconciling 'traditional notions of fair play and substantial
justice' that underlie all jurisdictional analysis with the
established tests for personal jurisdiction … the Court finds that
a defendant need not have knowledge as to which geographic forum
the plaintiff resides in, so long as the conduct was aimed at and
likely to cause harm in that forum. On the particular facts here,
therefore, the Court finds that the exercise of personal
jurisdiction over PNS and Williams is appropriate."
Seeborg said that whereas in the past targeted action demanded
that a person know another person's location, that was no longer
true, and an internet address replaced a physical address in many
cases.
He said that the realities of internet business should not
excuse PNS and Williams from sanctions they would otherwise
face.
"The mere fact that the internet provided PNS and Williams
[with] a tool by which they could carry out their conduct against
Facebook without first making efforts to learn its geographic
location is not a reason to excuse them from jurisdiction to which
they would otherwise be subject," he said.
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