Opinion ID: 205433
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Breach of ContractPublication

Text: We begin with IG's claim for breach of a contract. The sole written agreement between Gerngross and IG is found in Gerngross's April 8, 2002 letter to IG's Nikolsky, in which Gerngross acknowledged the following limitation on disclosure of the Pichia data: My research group at Dartmouth College is restricted to the publication of no more than 10kb of sequencing data from the Pichia genome per calendar year. Joint Ex. 2, R. 142-2 at 2. IG's contention is that Gerngross breached that limitation when he shared the entirety of the Pichia data with GlycoFi and in turn with Merck. The key question, then, is whether communication of the data to GlycoFi and Merck constituted publication of the data as that term was used in the agreement. The district court, of course, concluded that it did not, reasoning that publication ordinarily connotes disclosure to the public. As this claim was disposed of on summary judgment, our review is de novo. E.g., Norman-Nunnery v. Madison Area Tech. Coll., 625 F.3d 422, 428 (7th Cir.2010). In this diversity action, state law governs the substance of IG's claim. Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 58 S.Ct. 817, 82 L.Ed. 1188 (1938). The parties assume without discussion that Illinois law governs the contract between Gerngross and IG, a corporation whose principal place of business is in Illinois, and we have no reason to question that assumption. Under Illinois law, [c]ourts interpret contracts with the goal of effectuating the parties' intent, giving contract terms their plain and ordinary meaning. Kim v. Carter's Inc., 598 F.3d 362, 364 (7th Cir.2010) (citing Hot Light Brands, LLC v. Harris Realty Inc., 392 Ill.App.3d 493, 332 Ill.Dec. 72, 912 N.E.2d 258, 263 (2009)). Of course, the pertinent language must be viewed in context, and the contract must be construed not in a piecemeal fashion but as a whole in determining the parties' intent. Utility Audit, Inc. v. Horace Mann Serv. Corp., 383 F.3d 683, 687 (7th Cir.2004) (citing Trade Center, Inc. v. Dominick's Finer Foods, Inc., 304 Ill. App.3d 931, 238 Ill.Dec. 230, 711 N.E.2d 333, 335 (1999)). We believe that the district court correctly understood the plain and ordinary meaning of the term publication to signify disclosure to the public, rather than the disclosure of information to another individual or corporation within the context of a business or professional relationship. See BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 1242 (7th ed. 1999) (Generally, the act of declaring or announcing to the public); OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY ONLINE, http://english. oxforddictionaries.com (last visited Feb. 21, 2011) (the action of making something generally known); MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY ONLINE, http://merriam-webster.com/dictionary (the act or process of publishing; in turn defining publish as to make generally known, to make public announcement of and to disseminate to the public) (last visited Feb. 21, 2011); DICTIONARY.COM, http:// dictionary.reference.com (the act of bringing before the public; announcement) (last visited Feb. 21, 2011). This understanding is consistent with the term's derivation from the Latin verb publicare, see OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY ONLINE, http:// english.oxforddictionaries.com, which means to appropriate to the public use, CASSELL'S LATIN DICTIONARY 486 (1977). Gerngross never disclosed the Pichia data to the public, but he did share the information with both GlycoFi and Merck; and IG contends that publication should be understood to include the communication of information to an individual, or in this case, a corporation, as well as the public at large. But no common understanding of the term publication includes such a limited disclosure of information. IG relies on the Illinois Supreme Court's decision in Valley Forge Ins. Co. v. Swiderski Elecs., Inc., 223 Ill.2d 352, 307 Ill.Dec. 653, 860 N.E.2d 307 (2006), for the proposition that Illinois law defines publication to include the simple communication of information, whether it be to one person or to many. But Valley Forge is of little help to IG. The court in Valley Forge was called on to interpret the term publication in the context of certain insurance policy provisions obligating an insurer to defend its insured against suits for damages caused by personal and advertising injury. The policies in question defined personal and advertising injury to include [o]ral or written publication, in any manner, of material that violates a person's right to privacy and, similarly, [o]ral, written, televised or videotaped publication of material that violates a person's right of privacy. Id., 307 Ill.Dec. 653, 860 N.E.2d at 311. Swiderski Electronics, the insured, was sued for faxing unsolicited advertisements to numerous persons and businesses in violation of Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. § 227. The question before the court was whether the faxes constituted the publication of material that intruded upon one's right to privacy, such that the insurance companies had a duty to supply Swiderski with a defense. The terms publication, material, and privacy were left undefined by the policies. The court accorded publication its plain and ordinary meaning of communicating information to the public, id., 307 Ill.Dec. 653, 860 N.E.2d at 316-17, and reasoned that [b]y faxing advertisements to the proposed class of fax recipients as alleged in [the] complaint, Swiderski published the advertisements both in the general sense of communicating information to the public and in the sense of distributing copies of the advertisements to the public, id., 307 Ill.Dec. 653, 860 N.E.2d at 317. Based on its construction of the term publication, as well as the other policy terms, the court concluded that Swiderski's unsolicited faxes could be found to constitute written publications that violated the recipients' right to privacy. The suit against Swiderski was therefore properly characterized as one seeking compensation for personal and advertising injury, and the insurers were required to supply Swiderski with a defense. Insofar as it is relevant here, the Valley Forge decision adopted the same meaning of the term publicationthe communication of information to the publicthat we have. It is true, as IG points out, that we later described Valley Forge as interpret[ing] `publication' to mean nothing more than `communication.'  Auto-Owners Ins. Co. v. Websolv Computing, Inc., 580 F.3d 543, 550 (7th Cir.2009), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 130 S.Ct. 1884, 176 L.Ed.2d 363 (2010). But the point we were making in Auto-Owners was about the type of publication that interferes with one's right to privacy. Recall that the insurance policies at issue in Valley Forge covered suits for advertising and personal injury, which they defined in relevant part as the publication of material that interferes with a person's privacy right. This court, among others, had held that in order to violate that right, the publication must disclose some secret or personal information. Am. States Ins. Co. v. Capital Assocs. of Jackson County, Inc., 392 F.3d 939, 942-43 (7th Cir.2004). By contrast, Valley Forge reasoned that a publication in the form of an unsolicited fax advertisement violates the recipient's right to privacy in the sense that it intrudes upon his seclusion. 307 Ill.Dec. 653, 860 N.E.2d at 317-18. It was this divergence of understanding as to the confidential nature of the information that is published that we were addressing when we said that the Illinois Supreme Court had defined publication to mean nothing more than communication. Auto-Owners, 580 F.3d at 551. We were not construing Valley Forge to hold that under Illinois law, any means by which information is communicated constitutes publication, even if the information is communicated privately to one's business associate as opposed to the public. The Valley Forge decision itself makes clear that the fax communication at issue there was with members of the public at large.