Technology And The Law

Lost Database Not Insured.
"If you can't reach out and touch it, it is not insured." That was the gist of a court's ruling in a lawsuit brought by a company that lost a large amount of electronically stored data when an employee inadvertently pressed the "delete" key on a keyboard. The company looked to its insurer to cover the expenses for restoring the data and to recover lost income caused by the disruption. The insurer denied coverage on the basis of policy language that limited coverage to a "direct physical loss of or damage to" covered property.

The language from the policy was meant to be interpreted in its ordinary and popular sense. Thus, "physical" means "tangible" or capable of being touched. The information in a computerized database, in and of itself, has no material or tangible existence, unlike a storage medium for information, such as a disk, tape, or even papers in a file cabinet. The court concluded that when the employee sent the data into thin air with an unintended keystroke, there was no direct physical loss within the meaning of the insurance policy. (The court distinguished this case from another case in which the loss of a computer tape and the data on it were covered under a policy covering "physical injury or destruction of tangible property.")

Recognizing that the dictionary was not on its side, the company that lost its data also argued that public policy should weigh heavily in favor of insurance coverage. After all, loss of information in the same manner as occurred in this case is common, and our economy unquestionably is highly dependent on computers and the intangible information that they contain. However, the court declined to use public policy as an "interpretive aid." There are plenty of useful legal principles for construing insurance contracts, but using public policy to redefine the scope of coverage agreed to by parties to a contract is not one of them. The lesson: Questions of insurance coverage are to be answered solely in the language of the policies and, therefore, careful drafting of policy language is critical.

Got a Gripe? Start a Website
Joseph was planning to buy a new house from a builder until he came to the conclusion that the builder's sales representative had misled him about the availability of a particular model. In an earlier time, he might have been content to vent to a sympathetic neighbor across his backyard fence, but this is the age of cyberspace. Joseph registered an Internet name that was very similar to that of the builder and then created a website as a forum for relating the reasons for his frustration with the builder. He included a disclaimer making it clear that visitors were not on the builder's website. There was no charge to access the site and the site contained no paid advertisements. Once in a while, an e-mail intended for the builder came to Joseph's site, but he promptly forwarded it to the builder.

Also on the website was something Joseph called the "Treasure Chest," a place where readers could exchange information about contractors and tradespeople who had done good work. During the entire time the site was up and running, only one person was mentioned in the Treasure Chest. Although it was nearly empty, the Treasure Chest prompted the builder to sue Joseph under the federal Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). The ACPA only applies to someone who, with "a bad-faith intent to profit," registers or uses a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to that owned by someone else. Everyone agreed that the part of Joseph's website in which he aired his own complaints against the builder had no profit motive or commercial aspects, but the builder tried to argue that the Treasure Chest was a mingling of commercial activities with personal gripes.

A federal court ruled in favor of Joseph. The facts of the case did not amount to the conduct that the ACPA was meant to address, that is, setting up a business whose sole purpose is to register domain names that closely resemble the names of established businesses, and then attempting to sell the names to those businesses. The fact that Joseph meant to use the Treasure Chest to draw more people to his site to read his story did not convert the site into a commercial undertaking. He took no money either for being listed on the site or for viewing it, and the absence of paid advertising or links to other sites belied any profit motive. The website, especially with its very similar name, was no doubt a source of annoyance to the builder, but it was not a source of damages under the ACPA.