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Match.com Sued in Potential Class Action Lawsuit

By Stephanie Robinson

On December 30, 2010 Dallas-based Match.com was sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas by a group of individual plaintiffs seeking class-action certification. In the complaint, the plaintiffs allege breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation against Match.com based on their claims that the dating website contains ?thousands of fake and fraudulent profiles? and that some of those profiles were ?placed by third-parties for illegitimate and unlawful purposes.? The complaint alleges that Match.com ?makes little to no effort to vet, police, or remove these profiles and thereby permits, condones, and acquiesces in their posting.? Online content providers increasingly are facing legal challenges from both users and third parties demanding that they take affirmative steps to police the content they host. Google famously is facing an expensive and challenging legal fight initiated by Viacom alleging that Internet service providers either ?inducing? the use of their services for infringing activities or having reason to ?know? that their services are being used for those activities are ineligible for protection under the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Viacom wants to hold Google liable for copyright damages associated with third parties? posting of Viacom-owned content on YouTube. The devil, of course, is in how you define ?induce? or ?know,? and that same question now appears to be at the crux of the challenge now faced by Match.com. It will be interesting to see whether the plaintiffs? complaint in the Match.com case gains traction and, if so, whether social networking sites will start taking steps to reduce the frequency of spam-level profiles. Online content providers need to watch these developments closely, as unfavorable precedent could have a real and lasting impact on how they are able to do business in the future.

Full post as published by Business and Technology Law on January 07, 2011 (boomark / email).