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Proposed Class in Hulu Privacy Suit Needs Objective Data
With eye-popping damages at stake, a federal magistrate refused to allow consumer plaintiffs to move forward as a class with claims that Hulu violated their privacy by sharing the videos they viewed. In Re: Hulu Privacy Litigation, 11-03764.
In a 38-page order, San Francisco U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler of the Northern District of California dismissed without prejudice the plaintiffs' motion to certify a class of Hulu users. The plaintiffs filed their claims under the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), 18 U.S.C. '2710, which provides for statutory damages of $2,500 per violation. The VPPA was enacted by Congress in 1988 after a newspaper published a list of videos rented by U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
Hulu had warned it might have to pay billions in damages if a class were certified. Without a detailed proposal for verification from the plaintiffs, Magistrate Beeler concluded that she would likely have to rely on self-reporting to determine who belonged in the class. She insisted that class members should be subjected to greater scrutiny before cashing in on such a large award. “The claims apparently are not amenable to ready verification,” she wrote. “And at $2,500 per class member, they are not small.”
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