U.S. District Court Judge Nathanael Cousins recently denied Facebook’s motion for default judgment against Faceporn.com, a website operating out of Norway, for trademark infringement. Judge Cousins said the court lacked personal jurisdiction over the defendants and recommended that the case be dismissed.
Facebook originally brought suit against Thomas Pedersen and Retro Invent citing ten causes of action, including trademark dilution, violating the Facebook mark and wall mark, among others. The court concluded that Facebook failed to show that the defendants had purposefully directed their activities at California, pursuant to the three-pronged Calder test. In order to show that a defendant expressly aimed the intentional conduct at a forum state, the Ninth Circuit requires that the plaintiff show “something more.” The court determined that Facebook failed to show “something more” because “they did not establish that “Faceporn’s users in California were an integral component of Faceporn’s business model and profitability.”
Instead, Facebook attempted to argue that jurisdiction was proper because the defendants intended to target Facebook by “offering a pornographic version.” Facebook further claimed that the plaintiff can establish that nonresident defendant aimed its conduct at the forum by showing that the defendant illegally copied elements of a plaintiff’s mark for the purpose of competing with the plaintiff.
The court reasoned that this argument failed because Facebook and Faceporn are not in direct competition with each other, and therefore Facebook could not prove that the defendants’ conduct was directed at California. Additionally, the court said that Facebook failed to show how Faceporn “garnered revenue from their operation of Faceporn at Facebook’s expense or that Faceporn has diverted any of Facebook’s potential customers.”
Had Faceporn more directly targeted Facebook’s audience, Facebook might have been able to establish personal jurisdiction. But Judge Cousins correctly assessed that the audience for pornography is much more narrow than the audience for a general social networking site.
Read the full order below.
