Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Claim
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030, prohibits the intentional access of a protected computer to obtain information without authorization which causes at least $5,000 damage or loss resulting from a single unauthorized access. 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A) proscribes the intentional and unauthorized causing of damage to a protected computer resulting from knowingly causing the transmission of a program, information, code, or command.
The plaintiffs sought damages for the loss caused accruing from the unauthorized access of their computers and the misappropriation of information by DoubleClick. DoubleClick did not dispute that plaintiffs' computers were protected under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or that its access was unauthorized. The court stated that damages and losses under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act may only be aggregated across victims and over time for a single act. Since each access of a cookie on users' computers constitutes a single and separate act of unauthorized access, damages and losses may only be aggregated for each cookie and cannot be aggregated across multiple computers. The court dismissed the plaintiffs' claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on the grounds that the damage caused by each cookie did not meet the statutory threshold of $5,000.
Plaintiffs' alleged emotional distress due to DoubleClick’s invasion of their privacy, trespass to their personal property, and misappropriation of confidential data was not actionable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which only authorized the recovery of economic losses. The court denied the plaintiffs' claim that the alleged damage to the value of their individual demographic information, arising from DoubleClick's collection of user information, constitutes compensable economic loss. The court noted that while demographic information was valuable, its collection did not represent economic loss.
Read more about this topic: In Re Double Click
Famous quotes containing the words computer, fraud, abuse, act and/or claim:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“He saw, he wish’d, and to the prize aspir’d.
Resolv’d to win, he meditates the way,
By force to ravish, or by fraud betray;
For when success a lover’s toil attends,
Few ask, if fraud or force attain’d his ends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Incest and child abuse are not yet being presented as recreational.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Youth doesn’t reason, it acts. The old man reasons and would like to make the others act in his place.”
—Francis Picabia (1878–1953)
“Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim to all his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions ... extends so far, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)