BitTorrent defendant not negligent for failing to secure home Wi-Fi network

AF Holdings, LLC v. Doe, 2012 WL 3835102 (N.D. Cal., September 4, 2012)

Copyright troll plaintiff AF Holdings sued defendant for, among other things, negligence for failing to secure his home wi-fi network. Plaintiff argued that defendant’s inaction allowed a third-party to commit large-scale infringement of AF Holdings’ copyrighted works.

Defendant moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The court granted the motion and dismissed the negligence claim.

It held that a defendant like the one in this case had no duty to protect another from harm in this situation of “non-feasance” (i.e, failing to do something) unless a special relationship existed which would give rise to such duty. In law school this principal is articulated through the hypothetical of standing on a lakeshore watching someone drowning — you don’t have to jump in to save the person unless you are a lifeguard (or the victim’s parent, or a member of some other very limited class).

The court found that no special relationship existed here, thus plaintiff had not articulated any basis for imposing on defendant a legal duty to prevent the infringement of plaintiff’s copyrighted works.

We talked about this issue, along with other issues like copyright preemption, as it arose in a different case back on Episode 170 of This Week in Law beginning at about the 19 minute 40 second mark:

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