coverage for an underlying class action lawsuit that relates to the biometric information protection act bit as it's called received a lot of attention in the press and in the courts but this is the st occasion for this court to consider an insurance coverage case related to the book and the appeal presides two main issue krishna disclosed biometric information to a rd party vendor came within the policies coverage for personal injury for the publication of material that invaded a person's right of privacy and if the complaint alleges publication of information that invades the right  privacy then does the insurance policies exclusion for the violation of statutes that exclusion excludes claims for the violation statutes that prohibit or limit the disclosure of information does that exclusion apply to the allegations of the complaint that krishna disclosed biometric information to the rd party vendor and therefore the invasion of privacy coverage was implicated and here polar court also held that the is not disclosure to the public which is how the term is defined for the invasion the publication term is defined for the invasion of privacy coverage and number two the the violation of statutes exclusion applies because is this just you that limits or prohibits the disclosure of information and therefore bip all comes within the statutes or the disclosure for the invasion of privacy means the disclosure of information to the public and that is how this court interpreted the term and valley forge there's that's that is our argument your honor that is our argument based upon this court's opinion and valley forge versus sweaters electronics there and you know that the case in terms of discovery didn't develop you know what some link was doing with the biometric data so all we have is the allegation the sole allegation in the complaint that krishna disclosed biometric information to this rd party vendor some there is no other of electronics in valley forge that this court said that a publication for invasion of privacy meant disclosure to the public  in valley forge the court looked at the t c p ip a case and in the same coverage an invasion of privacy and and the the term publication isn't defined in the the you know the dictionary definitions of the term to determine truth it's plain ordinary and popular meeting and it's dictionary definition selected by the court in valley forge for publication for invasion of privacy of all it involved definitions that included the communication to the public component of the court  policies then i'd be hard pressed to get up here and say publication should be treated differently and in the policy because the policy is written that way  defamation and invasion of privacy together they're not they're separated and also if if we agreed that a definition a dictionary definition reflects the plain ordinary popular munni of a term we know that the definitions and some of them reflect the fact that in the defamation context publication is considered differently that as single disclosure in the defamation context is enough so that is that distinction is made in the definite in the dictionary definitions so i think we have to accept the fact that the common is a reasonable insured would recognise that because that's recognized in the dictionary definition that's what the popular understanding of the term for defamation means as opposed to what the term means for invasion of privacy and i'd also suggest that  this is a distinction that's made of the common law the common law that distinguishes publication and defamation differently from publication and  consult the common law treatment of those towards to gain an understanding of what the coverage should mean so that the coverage isn't expanded beyond what was contemplated by the parties from the policy was issued so when when we accept the fact that the common law publication is treated differently in a defamation versus invasion of privacy that the policy itself the coverages are separate is that defamation is separate coverage from invasion of privacy and the definitions that this court has selected for publication in valley forge all included the to the public component i think to the way to interpret the coverage the and when we look at and we cited a number of cases from outside of illinois that considered insurance coverage for class action lawsuits involving the violation of the fair and accurate credit card transaction act called factor and those cases involve an insured and was permitted was invading those individuals our right to privacy but the courts in all three cases held that the invasion of privacy coverage was not implicated because even though it was a class action and thousands of people who had it were given these receipts by the insured  disclosure to the public as we know from valley forge is publication under the policy and therefore the invasion of privacy cover that the exclusion did not apply to bit ball because it determined that it was not a statute that precluded specific methods of communicating information and its construction of exclusion was based upon the use of the term methods in the title and the fact that paragraph one of the exclusion specifically mentions five paragraphs three of the exclusion which provided wish applies to any stitching which prohibits or limits thank you good morning your honour's in a please the court my name is ben thomas and i'm here today representing the happily claudia secure your honor as counsel discussed with you just a few moments ago there's two issues in this case one's primary question on the st point our position is essentially the appellate court got it exactly right right the question is what the lay person would understand the term publication to mean when reviewing it in the context of the invasion of privacy coverage and as the appellate court noted all of the dictionary definitions have multiple definitions for the term publication they include the ones discussed by this court in valley forge and then they incorporate narrower disclosures such as in black's the limited or private disclosures of information in oxford the disclosure of information to just a rd party or other limited representatives of the public and the  takeaway from all of this is that the lay person in the position of the insured would understand as several courts have noted including the some circuit and defender security the supreme court of connecticut in the spring build on its case that we cite in our brief but understand that in the context of invasion of privacy coverage the insured would understand the term publication simply to mean the release of information by the entity holding it or the communication of words to a rd person and that has been the conclusion reached instance you need a broad to the public dissemination of information and that can't be right for several reasons st of all as i just discussed the dictionary definitions don't support it second as your honors were discussing the policy itself uses the exact same term oral or written publication of material to define the scope of both privacy offenses defamation offenses and as your author noted publications in has specific exclusions related to the oral or written publication of material there are two of them right one addresses the oral or written publication of material that happens before the policy period that's excluded from coverage and the other  addresses the oral or written publication of material that the insurer knew was false at the time the insured made it and so just like the consecutive affirmative policy provisions don't distinguish between that identical term neither do the exclusions and so the insured is presented with four uses of the term oral or written publication of material and there is nothing to indicate to the insured that he or she should treat zero publication different want to use here different when it's used here that sort of thing as multiple courts have noted in cases like this the insured is perfectly capable their speed median scheurer is perfectly capable of drafting insurance policies in any way chooses and if it wanted to limit the way the term publication was used and i had any of these specific policy provisions they could and should have done so but the insured can't be faulted for the insurers decision not to do that  another thing that your honour's discussed with with council was you're on or pointed to i believe there's a footnote in our brief which references that in addition to this disclosure to the rd party vendor sun link there were obviously additional disclosures right there's there's allegations that mistake yours information had to be transmitted to the national database which there's not details about this because of course we didn't know it at the time that we gave our allegations but those required out are the additional disclosures i'm just curious biometric and information to additional individuals so that her information could be inserted into this national database and so one thing your honor was discussing was well what if you have an insured disclosure of one customer biometric information to more than one vendor and what counsel replied was well that would be a publication because that more closely approximate approximates what this court was talking about in valley forge and given the standard at issue here that the court has to construe the allegations of the underlying complaint favorably favorably in favor of coverage there's no reason even if the court takes this same definition i was using valley forge and tries to fit it on the facts at issue here there's no reason why the court would find that coverage does not apply because as we just discuss there was this disclosure of for mation to multiple individuals and then one other thing i would like to discuss briefly on the publication issue is counsel has encouraged this court to look to the common law to see how the term publication is treated differently depending on where it's used in their brief they mostly talk about the court of public public disclosure of private facts which we agree has a publicized the elements right then they cite defender security the seven circuit case that looks at the difference between that published the elements and the term publication publicity usually requires they are brought to the public dissemination of information in the context of the tort the public disclosure of someone's private facts as against the term publication which is the one used in the policy here that is narrower and only requires a single disclosure of information another case that west bend cites in this brief is versus lampard which is a appellate court decision from the st district here which also went into the newspaper in order to satisfy that or what matters is you have to look at the information that's disclosed and who the information was disclosed to because a particular disclosure to a particular public may satisfy the publisher the element even though there isn't a broad published to the public dissemination of information and then once you look at the actual privacy offense at issue here the biometric information privacy act which as th  court noted and rosenbach versus six flags all the protections provided by that act are violated upon a single disclosure of a person's information or a single failure of an entity collecting biometric information to not do what the statute requires right so this is another instance where like defamation a single disclosure is enough to violate the privacy interests at issue and then one other thing i think it's important to to discuss briefly and realize is the context in which this court was discussing the term publication in valley forge and the appellate court it on this right the recognize that the privacy violation and by valley forward it was a seclusion interest that was at issue a seclusion interest is the right to be left alone and that can be violated by a single communication from one party to another and that's what valley forge involves right it was a communication from the defendant to the plaintiff and so the question that this court had to answer in valley forge is can you define the term publication in a way to  to cover that kind of seclusion violation and on the publication issue this court answer that yes there is a definition that encompasses that because publication can mean the broad disclosure of information and that case there was a broad facts span advertising campaign so even though there was a direct defendant to plaintiff communication it nevertheless fell within the scope of coverage and then you contrast that with the fact of cases that counsel is just talking about right fact it is a case that doesn't involve seclusion very interested involved secrecy interests the secrecy of a person's credit information among other things and that's why the statute prohibits businesses from printing too much information on credit cards or seize this to protect the privacy of that information so the question addressed by all those courts is that when you when you have a secrecy interest that issue can you have an invasion of privacy where you have a direct defendant to a plaintiff of his or her own private information and the answer to that question is of course no right and that's why all those courts also focused on  the definitions of the term they did because there's no way that you can find that there's an invasion of privacy coverage where you have a disclosure directly from the defendant to the plaintiff at least we're talking about secrecy interests which is what we're talking about here and again to bring the discussion back to rosenbach and st districts this decision and while our case secure versus krishna ten a single disclosure to a single other party is enough to violate the act and implicate the privacy interests that their own oil legislature intended to protect and so all those reasons are why taking weston's position and limiting the invasion of privacy coverage is just artificial does not comport with the way understanding of the term nor does that track the privacy offenses that are available under illinois law so i did want to take a few moments also talk about the statutory exclusion that counsel touched on the end of his argument again this is another court got the analysis exactly right in fact it called the analysis easy what the appellate court set out to do was to harmonize all the different parts of the exclusion and that started with the title right the title said that it only applies to certain statutes that regulate its methods of sending information like e mails faxes or phone calls it goes on to list two statutes like that the t c p a which regulates backs and phone act which regulates the mails and then it provides the catch all provision and says other statutes like those those are outside the scope of coverage too and so what west bend is suggesting here contrary to what presents to this court is that what the court should do is take that last section this is the section c consider in isolation and because section c by itself doesn't have the words methods you should ignore the rest of the exclusion which does use that specific term and references those specific statutes but as the appellate court correctly found here this court is not at liberty to do that just based on how an ordinary person would read that policy excluding coverage as well and the one thing i did want to note counsel didn't bring it up today but in their reply brief one thing west bend points to is this illinois bell case another appellate decision for the proposition that the heading of a statute in terms of statutory construction can't control over a more specific statutory provision but if you go to that opinion you'll see that that's an exception to a more general rule stated by this court in people  rest of the statute or document with it so in illinois bell the appellate court was looking at a statute that had something about local telephone coverage in its title several provisions of the statute specifically referenced local telephone coverage and then there was a final broader prison provision tacked onto the end of the statute which contrary to the rest of the statute did not specifically say that it related to local telephone coverage so what the  did in that instance was that that decision by the legislature must have been intentional they knew throughout the statute when they wanted it to apply to local telephone coverage but then they tacked on this broader provision at the end didn't include that specific reference so even though the that the statutes about local telephone coverage were not going to restrict the final section of the statute in that way because of this exception to the more general rule that i just mentioned from people who are suborning and so unless the court has any other questions of me i will take my seat to policy definition or dictionary definitions that included a single disclosure which we agree is a publication defamation cont rd the coverage of the term should be construed in the context of its use within the coverage and here the coverage we're talking about is invasion of privacy and and in that context publication means communication to the public and again i would get back to the fact that where the sense of the dictionary definitions make that distinction that reflects by the allegations of the compliant not what could have been alleged what might have occurred that's not what determines the duty to defend what determines the duty to defend or the allegations the complaint and the allegations of the complaint here are limited to warrant disclosure by krishna to someone that we don't know if they knew more about the the christian schomberg can system the l a consistent they should have put it in the complaint if they knew that the disclosures of biometric information went beyond the disclosure to someone we don't know how the program works all we know is the allegation of complaint and that's what controls of the duty to defend and here the duty to that it is trying to apply the appellate court's analysis of publication invalid for which to both the supreme court's interpretation publication valley forge and this case misses the point because in the appellate court and in valley forge the insurers were arguing that the coverage was limited victim argument it doesn't go to publication but that goes to is the nature of the us privacy interests being invaded by the insured in it disclosure to a rd party this secrecy disappears security but that goes to the nature of the interest being invaded not to publication publication looks at the conduct of the insured and is insured in the invasion of privacy context communicating to a large group of people to the public at large or his or communicated to an individual and and in vision privacy context communication to the individual is not publication because it's not communication to the public  the violation of statutes exclusion we're not trying to isolate paragraph three of the exclusion where we are arguing that