Pebble Beach Co. v. Caddy
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
453 F.3d 1151 (9th Cir. 2006)
English resident Michael Caddy (defendant) ran a bed and breakfast named Pebble Beach, after its location overlooking pebbly beaches, with a non-interactive website at www.pebblebeach-uk.com that provided no reservation or payment functionality; California-based Pebble Beach Company (plaintiff), which operates the famous golf resort under www.pebblebeach.com, sued Caddy for trademark infringement in California, noting Caddy had visited California and knew of the resort. The district court granted Caddy's motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, and Pebble Beach appealed.
Whether operating a passive, non-interactive website using a similar domain name, without any mechanism for forum-state residents to transact business through it, satisfies the purposeful-direction test for asserting personal jurisdiction over an out-of-state defendant.