Cairo, Inc. v. Crossmedia Services, Inc.
United States District Court for the Northern District of California
2005 WL 756610 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 1, 2005)
CMS's (defendant's) website posted a notice that continued use bound visitors to its terms of use, including a Chicago forum selection clause; Cairo (plaintiff) operated automated web-crawling robots that repeatedly scraped CMS's site content to display on Cairo's own platform. After CMS sent a cease-and-desist letter, Cairo sued in California federal court seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement; CMS moved to dismiss for improper venue under the forum selection clause, and Cairo argued no binding contract existed because it never expressly agreed to the terms, though it admitted having actual knowledge of them the day before receiving the cease-and-desist letter.
Whether a party's repeated and automated use of a website, whose content is offered to users subject to stated terms of use, imputes to that party knowledge of those terms sufficient to render them binding.