Pavlovich v. Superior Court
| Matthew Pavlovich v. Superior Court | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Court | Supreme Court of California |
| Full case name | Matthew Pavlovich v. The Superior Court of Santa Clara County |
| Decided | Nov. 25, 2002 |
| Citation(s) |
29 Cal |
| Case history | |
| Prior action(s) | Pavlovich v. Superior Court, 91 Cal. App. 4th 409 |
| Holding | |
| The case should be dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction because the defendant's posting to a passive website, that had a foreseeable tortious effect in California, was not enough to show purposeful availment. | |
| Court membership | |
| Chief Judge | George |
| Associate Judges | Brown, Kennard, Werdegar, Moreno, Baxter, Chin |
| Case opinions | |
| Concurrence | (no written opinion) Kennard, Werdegar, Moreno |
| Dissent | Baxter, joined by George, Chin |
Pavlovich v. Superior Court, 29 Cal. 4th 262, is a California Supreme Court case in which the court declined to find personal jurisdiction over a non-resident defendant who had no personal contacts with California. The Court found that the posting of a misappropriated trade secret on a Web site which could result in harm to California residents was not sufficient to show he had purposely availed himself of the forum state by expressly aiming his conduct at residents of California.
Although The Superior Court of Santa Clara County is the named respondent in the case, the real party in interest is the DVD Copy Control Association ("DVD CCA"), a nonprofit trade association. DVD CCA is a Delaware corporation, with its principal place of business in California. DVD CCA owned the licensing rights to the Content Scrambling System(CSS) which is used to encrypt and protect copyright material on DVDs.
Matthew Pavlovich was a computer engineering student at Purdue University in Indiana. While a student he operated a Web site "livid.on.openprojects.net." ("LiVid"). LiVid was founded to promote the development of video and DVD support for the Linux open source operating system. At the time of the California Supreme Court's decision he lived and worked in Texas.
Pavlovich posted the source code of a program called DeCSS on the LiVid Web site in October 1999. DeCSS allowed users to decrypt DVDs encrypted with CSS. In December 1999 DVD CCA filed suit against Pavlovich and other defendants in Santa Clara County Superior Court. In its complaint, DVD CCA alleged that Pavlovich misappropriated its trade secrets by posting the DeCSS program on the LiVid Web site. The complaint sought injunctive relief only.
Pavlovich filed a motion to quash service of process, asserting that the court did not have personal jurisdiction over him. The trial court denied the motion and Pavlovich appealed the ruling to the Court of Appeal for a writ of mandate. The Court of Appeal denied the petition without issuing a published opinion, the California Supreme Court granted review and transferred the matter back to the Court of Appeal with directions to vacate its denial order and issue an order to show cause (publish an opinion). The Court of Appeal again denied the petition, this time with a published opinion. Pavlovich then appealed this ruling to the California Supreme Court which granted review.
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