Seventh Circuit Finds Online Contacts Too Attenuated to Support Personal Jurisdiction
The plaintiff, be2 LLC, is a Delaware limited liability company headquartered in that state with a parent company organized and headquartered in Germany. be2 runs an Internet dating website at be2.com. be2 sued Nikolay Ivanov, a resident of New Jersey, in federal district court in Illinois, alleging that Ivanov had run a matchmaking service at the website be2.net, which was confusingly similar to plaintiff's domain name and design at be2.com.
Ivanov defaulted and judgment was entered against him but he later appeared and moved to vacate the judgment as void for want of personal jurisdiction over him in Illinois. The district court denied the motion to vacate and Ivanov appealed.
The Seventh Circuit noted that courts should exercise caution in resolving personal jurisdiction questions in the context of online contacts and emphasized that "[b]eyond simply operating an interactive website that is accessible from the forum state, a defendant must in some way target the forum state's market."
Here, the Seventh Circuit did not find sufficient evidence that Ivanov deliberately targeted the Illinois market:
All that be2 Holding submitted regarding Ivanov's activity related to Illinois is the Internet printout showing that just 20 persons who listed Illinois addresses had at some point created free dating profiles on be2.net. The printout shows only the nickname and age of each user, the city the user then called home, and the type of relationship the user was seeking. Even if these 20 people are active users who live in Illinois, the constitutional requirement of minimum contacts is not satisfied simply because a few residents have registered accounts on be2.net. To the contrary, these are attenuated contacts that could not give rise to personal jurisdiction without offending traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice.
In contrast, the Seventh Circuit distinguished this case from its earlier opinion in uBid v. GoDaddy Group (blogged here) where there was "massive and successful exploitation of the Illinois market."
The Seventh Circuit thus vacated the district court's order and remanded the case with instructions to vacate the judgment and dismiss the complaint based on a lack of personal jurisdiction.
The case cite is be2 LLC v. Ivanov, No. 10-2980 (7th Cir. Apr. 27, 2011).
