eBay v. Bidder's Edge

''eBay v. Bidder's Edge'', 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058 (N.D. Cal. 2000), was a leading case applying the trespass to chattels doctrine to online activities. In 2000, eBay, an online auction company, successfully used the 'trespass to chattels' theory to obtain a preliminary injunction preventing Bidder's Edge, an auction data aggregator, from using a ' crawler' to gather data from eBay's website. The opinion was a leading case applying 'trespass to chattels' to online activities, although its analysis has been criticized in more recent jurisprudence.

Origins of dispute

Bidder's Edge ("BE") was founded in 1997 as an "aggregator" of auction listings. Its website provided a database of auction listings that BE automatically collected from various auction sites, including eBay. Accordingly, BE's users could easily search auction listings from throughout the web rather than having to go to each individual auction site.

In early 1998, eBay allowed BE to include Beanie Babies and Furby auction listings in BE's database. It is unclear whether BE scraped these listings from eBay or linked to them in some other format. However, on April 24, 1999, eBay verbally approved BE automatically "crawling" the eBay web site for a period of 90 days.

During this time, the parties contemplated striking a formal license agreement. These negotiations did not conclude successfully because the parties could not agree on technical issues. Subsequently, in early 1999, BE added auction listings from many other sites in its database, including eBay's. Despite the integration of many websites' listings, nearly 69% of the listings in BE's database were from eBay.

eBay wanted BE to access the eBay system only when a BE user queried the BE system. Doing so would increase the accuracy/currency of the data BE presented to its users and impose a lighter load on eBay's network. BE accessed eBay approximately 100,000 times a day, constituting about 1.53% of eBay's total daily requests. BE wanted to periodically crawl eBay's entire website to compile its own auction database, which would increase the speed of BE's response to user queries and allow BE to notify its users when eBay auctions changed.

Further developments leading to suit

Due to the disagreement regarding technical issues, at the end of the 90-day period, eBay notified BE that its activities were no longer permitted, but eBay offered again to license BE's activities. BE did not accept eBay's offer.

In late August or early September 1999, eBay requested by telephone that BE cease posting eBay auction listings on its site. BE agreed to do so. In October 1999, BE learned that other auction aggregations sites were including information about eBay auctions.

On November 2, 1999, BE issued a press release indicating that it had resumed including eBay auction listings on its site. On November 9, 1999, eBay sent BE a letter reasserting that BE's activities were unauthorized, insisting that BE cease accessing the eBay site, alleging that BE's activities constituted a trespass of eBay's chattels and offering to license BE's activities.

IP address blocking and proxy

As a result, eBay attempted to block BE from accessing the eBay site; by the end of November 1999, eBay had blocked a total of 169 IP addresses it believed BE was using to query eBay's system. BE continued crawling eBay's site by using proxy servers to evade eBay's IP address blocks. Information requests sent through such servers cannot easily be traced back to the originating IP Address, which allowed Bidder's Edge to evade eBay's attempts to block queries from the originating IP address.

Lawsuits

eBay sued Bidder's Edge on December 10, 1999, in the Northern District of California federal court. eBay moved for a preliminary injunction on the following causes of action:
# Trespass to chattels,
# False advertising under the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a),
# Trademark dilution,
# violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030,
# Unfair competition