Register.com, Inc. v. Verio, Inc.
United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
356 F.3d 393 (2004)
Register.com (plaintiff), a domain-name registrar, published registrants' contact information as required by federal regulation, attaching a notice barring use of the data for mass unsolicited commercial solicitation by email. Verio (defendant) built automated software to repeatedly query this data daily and then marketed to the new registrants by email, phone, and mail. After Register.com expanded its notice to also bar mass solicitation by phone and direct mail, Verio stopped emailing but kept using the data for phone and mail marketing, arguing it never received binding notice of the updated restriction. The district court enjoined Verio, and Verio appealed.
Whether a party is contractually bound by the restrictive conditions attached to a benefit it is aware of, even though it does not agree with those conditions, when it continues taking the benefit.