Snow v. DirecTV, Inc.
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2006
- Citation
- 450 F.3d 1314 (11th Cir. 2006)
- Standard applied
- Stored Communications Act § 2701 — facilities not readily accessible to the public
What the court held
A complaint alleging that a company and its lawyers accessed the plaintiff's electronic bulletin board without authorisation failed to state a claim under the Stored Communications Act, because it did not allege that the website was configured so as not to be readily accessible by the general public. The dismissal was affirmed on that ground rather than on the district court's reasoning that bulletin boards are never in electronic storage.
Why
The Act protects communications held on a facility that is not readily accessible to the public, so the configuration of the system is an element the plaintiff must plead. A homepage notice expressly forbidding access by particular parties, coupled with a registration and password step and terms disclaiming association with them, was not pleaded in a way that established the required inaccessibility.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Snow is the case that turns the SCA's protection into a factual question about system configuration rather than about the owner's intentions, which is a forensic question rather than a legal one. Anyone asserting an SCA claim over a private forum, portal, or shared drive must be able to describe the access controls concretely — who could register, what the barrier actually was, and how it was enforced. A terms-of-use prohibition is not an access control.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: Stored Communications Act · access controls · bulletin board · pleading
Cited 444times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
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Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.