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Loss for QVC on Internet Crawling Case

By Saranac Hale Spencer
April 02, 2015

In an opinion that has defined a section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a law that has been clouded by decades of amendments, a federal judge in Philadelphia has ruled in favor of an Internet startup company and against retail giant QVC. QVC v. Resultly, 2:14-cv-06714 (E.D. Pa March 13, 2015).

U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, who joined the bench at the end of 2014, rejected QVC's motion for a preliminary injunction that would have barred the startup called Resultly from selling its intellectual property before the case is over. Resultly is a four-year-old company that uses open source code to crawl retail websites in order to help users find and purchase merchandise, according to Beetlestone's opinion.

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