Guinness World Records Ltd. v. Doe

• Decision Date: 20 October 2009
• Docket Number: No. 09 C 2812.,09 C 2812.
• Citation: Guinness World Records Ltd. v. Doe, 664 F.Supp.2d 927 (N.D. Ill. 2009)
• Parties: GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS LIMITED, Plaintiff, v. John DOE, d/b/a World Records Academy, Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois

Page 927

664 F.Supp.2d 927

GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS LIMITED, Plaintiff, v. John DOE, d/b/a World Records Academy, Defendant.

No. 09 C 2812.

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division.

October 20, 2009.

Marsha Kathryn Hoover, Christopher William Schneider, William T. McGrath, Davis, Mannix & McGrath, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff.

Daliah Saper, Saper Law Offices, Chicago, IL, for Defendant.

MEMORANDUM ORDER

MILTON I. SHADUR, Senior District Judge.

World Records Academy (to which this opinion will refer simply as "Academy," to avoid any contribution by this Court to the asserted confusion ascribed to Academy by the Complaint here) has filed a Fed. R.Civ.P. 12(b)(2) motion for its dismissal from this action brought against it by Guinness World Records Limited (referred to here simply as "Guinness" for the same reason). At this Court's request, both sides have tendered supplemental submissions to focus more sharply their respective positions as to Academy's Illinois-based involvement or noninvolvement.

If all that were in issue in that respect were Academy's website, this Court would view it as a quite solid winner. On that score both sides have pointed to Jennings v. AC Hydraulic A/S, 383 F.3d 546 (7th Cir.2004) as the only (and as a definitive) Seventh Circuit decision addressing the subject. This Court's view has always been that in these times of electronic communication, any ruling that would convert the ubiquitous website into its owner's consent to be haled into court whenever the website has penetrated the forum in electronic terms would erase all of the lines that the courts—including the Supreme Court and, of course, our Court of Appeals—have traditionally marked out to define the rules of decision on in personam jurisdiction: If that erasure were to take place, everyone with a website might arguably be sued everywhere.

Thus it is that Jennings has joined other Circuits in holding that the mere maintenance of a passive website does not suffice to establish personal jurisdiction. As Judge Rovner put that proposition in Jennings, id. at 550 (citation omitted):

With the omnipresence of the Internet today, it is unusual to find a company that does not maintain at least a passive website. Premising personal jurisdiction on the maintenance of a website, without requiring some level of "interactivity" between the defendant and consumers in the forum state, would create almost universal personal jurisdiction because of the virtually unlimited accessibility of websites across the country. This scheme would go against the grain of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence which has stressed that, although technological advances may alter the analysis of personal jurisdiction, those advances may not eviscerate the constitutional limits on a state's power to exercise jurisdiction over nonresident defendants.

While Jennings does not itself teach how far up the scale of activity a website may have to travel to cross the boundary into the area where it will be viewed as "interactive" (id. at 549), and thus as subjecting a party to suit in the forum, various District Courts here have addressed that issue. But because District Court opinions and decisions are nonprecedential, they cannot perform the role that Justice Harlan (dissenting in Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 543, 81 S.Ct. 1752, 6 L.Ed.2d 989 (1961))—and decades earlier, in like language, Justice Cardozo in The Paradoxes of Legal Science 96—described as generating "a series of isolated points pricked out" so as to produce a line of decision.

In any case, to return to Jennings, its controlling criterion for determining a website's interactivity—a website "on which consumers can order the defendant's goods or services" (383 F.3d at 549)—is absent from Academy's. Instead its website describes its goods and services to the general universe of its viewers and explains how they may initiate purchases if they choose to do so. As already indicated, if that were the only relevant consideration, in this Court's view it would clearly call for granting Academy's Rule 12(b)(2) motion.

But what about Academy's more direct and more focused marketing efforts looking to possible Illinois customers? Its current Mem. 5 describes that activity in these terms:

As a means of gaining world-wide exposure, WRA sends a standard form email to any record holders the company discovers through press releases and a variety of other publicly accessible sources, such as websites. The record holders can span the globe, from New York, to Japan, to Australia. The purpose of the message is to inform a world record holder that their record has been listed on WRA's website. Further, the message indicates that the record holder may provide any pictures or video that the record holder may have of his or her achievement for placement on the WRA website. Lastly, the message states that the record holder may contact WRA and request a copy of his or her world record certificate. Notably, the contents of this standard email...