LVRC Holdings LLC v. Brekka
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
581 F.3d 1127 (2009)
- Written by Mike Cicero , JD
Facts
In April 2003, LVRC Holdings, LLC (LVRC) (plaintiff) hired Christopher Brekka (defendant) to oversee aspects of Fountain Ridge, a residential treatment facility for addicted persons. The employment agreement was unwritten. Part of Brekka’s duties included interacting with LOAD, Inc., a company hired by LVRC to provide email, website, and related services for Fountain Ridge. In June 2003, Brekka obtained from Nick Jones, a LOAD administrator, his username “[email protected]” and an administrative log-in password for LVRC’s website. LVRC and Brekka discussed the possibility of Brekka purchasing an ownership interest in LVRC, and in August and September 2003, Brekka emailed to himself various LVRC financial and administrative documents. By mid-September, however, negotiations terminated and Brekka stopped working for LVRC. In November 2004, Jones discovered that someone had used [email protected] to log into LVRC’s website and was accessing LVRC’s LOAD statistics. LVRC then sued Brekka for alleged violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) when he emailed the LVRC documents to himself and when he allegedly accessed LVRC’s website in November 2004. Brekka moved for summary judgment and provided undisputed evidence that: (1) when he left LVRC, the username and password he had obtained from Jones remained on his computer; (2) at least two LVRC employees used that computer; (3) others had access to the computer after Brekka left LVRC; and (4) LVRC had established only that an internet service provider associated with the November 2004 access was located in Redwood City, California but had not identified the person who had used the “cbrekka” login. The district court granted Brekka’s motion, finding that: (1) when Brekka emailed the LVRC documents to himself, he was still employed by LVRC and was thus authorized to access those LVRC documents; and (2) LVRC had failed to adduce sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to find that Brekka was the person who accessed LVRC’s website in November 2004. LVRC appealed, contending that Brekka had emailed the LVRC documents to himself to further his own side businesses and not the interests of LVRC and that therefore Brekka had accessed those documents without authorization as defined by the CFAA.
Rule of Law
Issue
Holding and Reasoning (Ikuta, J.)
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