CustomGuide v. CareerBuilder, LLC, 2011 WL 3809768 (N.D.Ill. August 24, 2011)
Plaintiff and defendant had discussed a licensing arrangement whereby defendant would provide certain of plaintiff’s materials online. The parties never entered into that agreement. But plaintiff claimed that defendant went ahead and accessed the materials stored on plaintiff’s computer system, and thereby caused plaintiff to miss out on certain sales in the business to business marketplace for the materials.
So plaintiff sued, alleging a variety of claims, including a claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Defendant moved to dismiss. The court granted the motion.
The CFAA defines a “loss” as “any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring the data, program, system, or information to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption of service.” 18 U.S.C. ยง 1030(e)(11).
The court looked to the case of Cassetica Software v. Computer Sciences Corp., 2009 WL 1703015, (N.D.Ill. June 18, 2009) which explained that “[w]ith respect to ‘loss’ under the CFAA, other courts have uniformly found that economic costs unrelated to computer systems do not fall within the statutory definition of the term.” Rather, the purported loss “must relate to the investigation or repair of a computer system following a violation that caused impairment or unavailability of data.” For these reasons, the court in Cassetica Software held that lost revenues that were not related to the impairment of a computer system were not recoverable under the CFAA.
In this case, the court found that plaintiff did not allege any facts connecting its purported “loss” to an interruption of service of its computer systems. Instead, the complaint described an economic loss of revenues related plaintiff’s making business to business sales. Because such economic losses do not fall within the definition of “loss” under the CFAA, the court tossed the CFAA claim.