A judge in the Northern California District Court has thrown out the countersuit Power.com levied against Facebook over the summer. Power.com filed its countersuit in July, alledging that, among other things, Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS) and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services.
Power.com is a service that allows users to aggregate all of their social network activity into a central hub, and has done so through methods that Facebook says violate its terms of use. Facebook filed suit against the company at the beginning of this year for scraping data and storing user credentials. A week later there were reports that the two parties were near a settlement, but that clearly didn’t happen.
The judge attributes the dismissal to a lack of concrete complaints and factual allegations in Power.com’s countersuit. We’ve embedded the full document below.
Update:
Power.com has given us the following statement, saying that they will continue the case after fine tuning their arguments:
Earlier in the case Judge Fogel granted Power’s motion to require Facebook to provide a more detailed pleading of its claims. Yesterday’s order essentially does the same thing with respect to Power’s counterclaims and affirmative defenses. The Court determined that Power’s pleading did not provide enough detail with respect to the fair use defense and other affirmative defenses, and also with respect to the counterclaims under the unfair competition laws. The Court gave Power 30 days, until November 21, 2009, to re-plead their defenses and counterclaims with more detail. Power intends to do so.
This is a routine type of order that often occurs in the early stages of litigation, where the parties dispute the sufficiency of the pleadings in terms of the level of factual detail that is provided. Power is confident that it will be able to amend its pleading within 30 days to satisfy the Court’s concerns.
Power’s Answer and Counter-Complaint contains a seven and a half page “Introduction and Background” narrative untethered to any specific claim. The claims themselves each consist of a conclusory recitation of the applicable legal standard and a general “reference [to] all allegations of all prior paragraphs as though fully set forth herein.” Facebook argues persuasively that this form of pleading does not enable the Court to surmise which facts in the introductory narrative support which claims, if in fact they do. Moreover, antitrust claims require a “higher degree of particularity in the pleadings.”
Copying Stuff is not really going to work!
Fail to come up with the facts and you will get shut down. This should not be a surprise to anyone.
I wonder if Google will file a suit against Facebook for scraping Orkut data
:’(
haha
i wrote in the comments from when power initially did the countersuit, and i wrote how stupid power.com is for thinking that its against the law to withhold data from competitors, it doesnt matter if you break your own tos, its a fucking tos
What will Boyan Josik @power do now?
Doesn’t work there. He launched profilesnaps.com
Surprising they raised that kind of funding on an idea that was inherently unstable- given the dependency on scraping data from a company that would see them as competition. Makes you wonder what sort of diligence investors do before spending their LP’s money.
Its funny to see a company with so many lawsuits in Brazil for not paying their employees spending money this way, i can only guess that the media coverage pays off.
Power.com won’t use facebook connect because they want to store user data forever, that’s their “value” and “big plan”, that’s what they do with google orkut in brazil/india.
Good domain name power.com and good project.
What was power.com even thinking…
Do they have a legal deptt?
Um, ya – LAW OFFICES OF SCOTT A. BURSOR – and he was only lead counsel on 3 of the largest class action suits ever filed.
http://bursor.c...lass_action.htm
From law.Harvard.edu – interesting take
Whether or not Power.com ultimately prevails may have far-reaching effects on social networking sites and the personal data they amass, since one of Facebook’s greatest assets is the personal information it has collected on its over 300 million users. Facebook has an undeniable interest in keeping this information from potential competitors such as Power.com. In such an environment, it may be difficult for a new competitor to reach critical mass and to obtain enough users for the network effect to take hold. At the same time, users are very concerned about their privacy and Facebook has faced vocal criticism in the past whenever it instituted policies that users felt were threatening (e.g. Facebook Beacon). It would be even more difficult for Facebook to protect its users’ privacy if the data was shared with third-parties. With this in mind, it may not be hyperbole to say that the outcome of this case could affect a population the size of America.
Full link: http://jolt.law...er-ventures-inc
The basic thing is violation of privacy that leads many issues so i hope what will step taking place that will better for users…..
Did power.com really not foresee a problem with FaceBook? They’re pretty naive if they think FB would just hand over their information.