Opinion ID: 2974426
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Dismissal for Lack of Standing

Text: In the more than 20 years since Congress passed the Cable Act in 1984, the statute has remained largely unamended. The section invoked in this litigation, 47 U.S.C.A. § 551, provides measures to protect the privacy of cable subscribers. Specifically, subsection (b) prohibits cable operators from using cable systems to collect “personally identifiable information” about subscribers. 47 U.S.C.A. § 551(b). Specifically, it provides: (1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), a cable operator shall not use the cable system to collect personally identifiable information concerning any subscriber without the prior written or electronic consent of the subscriber concerned. (2) A cable operator may use the cable system to collect such information in order to - (A) obtain information necessary to render a cable service or other service provided by the cable operator to the subscriber; or (B) detect unauthorized reception of cable communications. Id. The phrase “personally identifiable information” is not defined in the statute except in the negative. The term “does not include any record of aggregate data which does not identify particular persons.” 47 U.S.C.A. § 551(a)(2)(A). It was perhaps this provision that led the district court to the conclusion that the plaintiff lacked standing to bring this action, despite the language of § 551(f) that explicitly permits cable subscribers to bring a civil action to enforce the privacy measures. Of course, “[i]n order to establish the injury in fact element of standing, the plaintiff must show that he has sustained or is immediately in danger of sustaining some direct injury as the result of the challenged . . . conduct.” Kardules v. City of Columbus, 95 F.3d 1335, 1347 (6th Cir. 1996) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). “Put another way, the injury must be both concrete and particularized, meaning that the injury must affect the plaintiff in a personal and individual way.” Id. (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Furthermore, the injury may not be “the product of speculation or conjecture.” Id. at 1348. The district court reasoned that because the plaintiff did not allege that the defendant had ever reconciled collected IP-URL linkages with subscribers’ names, any claim that the information collected was “personally identifiable” was speculative, and2the plaintiff therefore had no standing to bring suit for a violation of the Act’s privacy provisions. After a study of the relevant provisions of § 551, we conclude to the contrary and hold that in light of subsection (f), the plaintiff’s allegation that the defendant improperly collected IP-URL linkage information, taken as true, ostensibly alleged an injury under subsection (b). The district court’s determination that the complaint was inadequate because it alleged that the information about subscribers was based on IP addresses, but did not allege correlation of those addresses to individual subscribers’ names is, in our judgment, better analyzed not as a lack of standing, but rather as the lack of a well-pleaded § 551(b) claim. 2 The district court also noted as part of its standing analysis that dynamic IP addresses are not in and of themselves personally identifiable information because, “[u]nlike a subscriber’s name, address, social security number, etc., a dynamic IP address is constantly changing.” However, in basing the dismissal on the dynamic nature of the IP addresses, the court overlooked the fact that not all IP addresses are dynamic and that the complaint did not allege that such was the case. We pretermit discussion of this factor as irrelevant. We further note that IP addresses do not in and of themselves reveal “a subscriber’s name, address, [or] social security number.” That information can only be gleaned if a list of individual subscribers is matched up with a list of their individual IP addresses. No. 03-2012 Klimas v. Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. Page 5