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Ideal Aerosmith, Inc. v. Acutronic USA (WD Pa 4/23/08)
Ideal sued Acutronic and others (collectively "Acutronic") for misappropriation of trade secrets and related claims. The court denied Acutronic's motion for judgment on the pleadings. Ideal briefly operated the business of a competitor, Carco Electronics, while Carco was in bankruptcy. In connection with its operation, Ideal hired Carco's employees and used Carco's email addresses. Carco was subsequently acquired by Acutronic. The former Carco employees hired by Ideal did not join Acutronic, but remained Ideal employees and were given new Ideal email addresses. Ideal alleges that despite these new email addresses, former Carco employees and third-parties doing business with Ideal inadvertently continued to send communications using the old Carco email addresses. According to Ideal, Acutronic, which now owned the Carco servers, caused the servers to redirect those email messages to an Acutronic server. Acutronic then read the messages, some of which allegedly contained Ideal trade secrets.
Acutronic argued that Ideal's remaining claims for misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition, and civil conspiracy were preempted by the Stored Communications Act ("SCA"). As the court noted, 18 U.S.C. §2701 prohibited only the unauthorized access to stored communications, while other provisions addressed the disclosure of the contents of stored communications in narrow contexts. The general purpose of the SCA was to create a cause of action against computer hackers. While the court tended to agree with Acutronic that 18 U.S.C. §2708 seemed facially to contain an express preemption, it did not need to decide this issue. The facts showed that Acutronic did not provide an electronic communication or remote computing service to the public, nor did it disclose the contents of emails to a governmental entity in connection with a criminal investigation. Therefore, Acutronic's conduct was not addressed by the SCA's disclosure provisions. Accordingly, the SCA's preemption clause, by its terms, did not apply to the facts of this case. Regarding the issue of field preemption, neither the language of the SCA itself nor the Congressional record demonstrated an intent to regulate the entire field governing the disclosure of stored communications. For similar reasons, Acutronic's argument for conflict preemption failed as well.
