Reuters Urges Manhattan Court to Dismiss Plaintiff’s CIPA ‘Nuisance Suit’

Plaintiff Zhizhi Xu’s putative class action alleging that Reuters violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) is a “copycat” of at least six other complaints Xu’s counsel filed in the Southern District of New York. This, according to Reuters' memorandum of law Friday (docket 1:24-cv-02466) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan in support of its motion to dismiss. Xu alleges that three tracking pixels on the Reuters website collect visitors' IP addresses in violation of the CIPA (see 2404020024|). But Xu’s complaint is “the epitome of a nuisance suit,” the memorandum said, adding that Xu's counsel has filed similar suits outside New York during the last several months. “Flagrantly misinterpreting” a narrow California federal district court decision “far beyond its factual confines,” Xu seeks to upend internet commerce “by criminalizing the way the internet functions,” it said. Xu urges the court to hold Reuters liable under California’s penal code for thousands of dollars in statutory damages “to each and any California resident who voluntarily decides to click on Reuters.com," it said. That’s solely because Reuters allegedly collects visitors’ IP addresses, it said. But that data is “voluntarily and necessarily provided to Reuters” so that visitors’ browsers can properly display the website, it said. Not only did the California legislature not intend for the CIPA to be such a “blank check,” but a fair reading of the text can’t “bear such an interpretation either,” it said. Reuters asks for a dismissal of the class action with prejudice because it fails to include allegations demonstrating that Xu “has the necessary standing to bring his complaint” and his single-count class action “otherwise fails to state a claim as a matter of law.”