QVC Inc. v. Resultly LLC, No. 14-06714
(E.D. Pa., filed Nov. 24, 2014)

Complaint Recently Filed:

  • QVC Inc. ("QVC"), an e-commerce company, brought an action against Resulty LLC ("Resulty") in federal court, alleging that the company violated federal law when its personalized shopping app crashed QVC's website.
  • Resulty is a free online shopping app that uses web crawling software to "crawl" thousands of online shopping websites in order to find the current prices of certain products.
  • QVC alleges that Resulty's web crawling program, used to scan the Internet for product prices, was responsible for crashing its website, which was down for two days.
  • Specifically, QVC claims that Resulty's use of the program to crawl the QVC site was at an "excessive rate," thereby overloading QVC's website and causing it to crash.
  • Finally, QVC claims that Resulty also attempted to hide its program and IP address in an effort to conceal the source of the crawling activity.
  • To sum up the allegations, the complaint states that, "QVC seeks to recover damages from defendant Resulty for knowingly causing the transmission of its program and intentionally or negligently causing damages by overloading QVC's website and network without authorization."
  • The complaint alleges several causes of action, including: 1) that Resulty violated QVC's website Terms and Conditions by using the site for business other than shopping; 2) that it violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; and 3) and other claims, such as unjust enrichment, tortious interference with economic advantage, conversion and negligence.
  • According to various news reports, Resulty responded to the allegations by denying that the software was used in a negligent or malicious way.

Take Away:

  • It will be interesting to see whether the parties settle the matter before the court has an opportunity to rule on the issues before it.
  • Website Terms and Conditions are a key component to any Internet-based company's online presence and provide a contractual basis with which to act against those that "crawl" and/or "scrape" a website.
  • While it is never advisable to "crawl" or "scrape" third-party sites, a decision on this case will provide important precedent as to potential damages associated with such actions particularly where, as here, a party's "crawling" activities allegedly have caused a website outage.

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