Opinion ID: 205620
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Defendant BiddingerSpecific Personal Jurisdiction for Posting the Allegedly Defamatory Email on the Wave59 Internet Forum

Text: After receiving Mr. Stewart's email about the termination of his business relationship with Mr. Shrader, Mr. Biddinger posted the email on the Wave59 forum in response to an inquiry from another forum member about Mr. Shrader's work. There is no indication that this other member had any connection with Oklahoma. And, as already explained, the Wave59 site and its forum have no particular connection with Oklahoma. Finally, there is nothing about the content of Mr. Shrader's work, or his internet customer base, that has been shown to have any tie to Oklahoma. In sum, the only connection with Oklahoma shown on our record is that Mr. Shrader lives and produces his materials there. As noted earlier, merely posting information on the internet does not, in itself, subject the poster to personal jurisdiction wherever that information may be accessed. This principle has particular salience for defamation cases: Posting on the internet from [outside the forum state] an allegedly defamatory statement [about a forum resident] ... does not create the type of substantial connection between [the poster] and [the forum state] necessary to confer specific personal jurisdiction. Johnson v. Arden, 614 F.3d at 797. [T]he plaintiff's residence in the forum, and suffering of harm there, will not alone support jurisdiction under Calder.  Revell, 317 F.3d at 473; accord Young, 315 F.3d at 262. Rather, defamatory postings may give rise to personal jurisdiction if they are directed specifically at a forum state audience or otherwise make the forum state the focal point of the message. Johnson, 614 F.3d at 796; Revell, 317 F.3d at 473; Young, 315 F.3d at 263. The thrust of this case law is consistent with this circuit's restrictive reading of Calder : Some courts have held that the `expressly aimed' portion of Calder is satisfied when the defendant individually targets a known forum resident. We have taken a somewhat more restrictive approach, holding that the forum state itself must be the focal point of the tort.  [7] Dudnikov, 514 F.3d at 1074 n. 9 (emphasis added) (citation, alteration, and quotations omitted). Oklahoma was not the focal point of the email posted by Mr. Biddinger, either in terms of its audience or its content. We have already seen that the forum where he posted the email targeted a trading community with no particular tie to Oklahoma. As for content, the email was about Mr. Shrader's work. That work was marketed and sold worldwide through the internet (there is no suggestion that Mr. Shrader had any local sales outlet) and there is nothing about the nature of the work inherently linking it to Oklahomaas there might be had Mr. Shrader been located in a trading center like New York or Chicago and relied on that tie in producing or marketing his materials. He produced his materials in Oklahoma because he happened to live there; his professional reputation in the trading community was not tied to Oklahoma, as Ms. Jones's was to the California entertainment industry in Calder. To be sure, he suffered harm in Oklahoma in the sense that he incurred harm and resided in Oklahoma when he did so. But, as noted above, plaintiff's residence in the forum state, and hence suffering harm there, does not alone establish personal jurisdiction over a defendant who has not purposefully directed his activities at the state. It is instructive to compare the instant case with a recent unpublished decision in which this court found specific personal jurisdiction for defamation and related tort claims arising out of a derogatory blog posting that adversely affected the plaintiff's business in New Mexico. See Silver v. Brown, 382 Fed.Appx. 723 (10th Cir.2010). Differences in the two factual scenarios point up what is missing here. First, the blog on which the defendant in Silver posted the derogatory message was not a neutral forum already in place for other purposes, but was created by the defendant specifically to provide a launch pad for his attack on the plaintiff's business. Id. at 725-26, 729. Indeed, the names of the plaintiff and his business were incorporated in the blog's domain name, a fact this court found significant in light of the defendant's deliberate exploitation of search-engine technology to funnel searches regarding the plaintiff and his business to the blog, which warned them about the plaintiff and provided a link to reputable competitors. Id. at 725-26 & n. 2, 730. Finally, unlike here, there was no indication that the plaintiff's business, raising capital for new ventures, was conducted through cyberspace with no particular tie to the forum state; on the contrary, that state [was] unquestionably the center of his business activities. Id. at 730. The plaintiff funded dinner meetings for eleven years, one evening a month at which New Mexico entrepreneurs pitched their deals to [prospective] investors, and his work had helped create or save employment for more than 3,000 people in New Mexico. Id. (quotation omitted). In short, both the derogatory message and the blog it was posted on uniquely targeted a business centered in the forum state and were directed at an audience that would inherently have included a substantial number of forum state residents and businesses. Nothing like that is true of the forum and post at issue here. Given the geographically-neutral content of the message posted by Mr. Biddinger and the inquiry that prompted it (regarding the status of a business selling market-trading materials over the internet), the geographically-neutral nature of the forum where it was posted, and the lack of any facts developed by Mr. Shrader to suggest otherwise, there is no basis for concluding that Mr. Biddinger targeted his post at Oklahoma. On the contrary, every indication is that Mr. Biddinger targeted the post at a nation-wide or world-wide audience of market traders with no inherent interest in or tie to Oklahoma. That is an insufficient basis for exercising personal jurisdiction.