ALLEGHENY COUNTY, PA — In a ruling issued last week, Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wittick Jr. found that his court in Pennsylvania does not have jurisdiction over the Florida-based website DontDateHimGirl.com, a finding based largely on the fact that the defendants “do not perform a significant amount of commercial business over the Internet.”DontDateHimGirl.com is a site that permits users to post profiles of men, including pictures, who allegedly have cheated on them, treated them poorly, or otherwise displeased them in the course of dating, as a warning to other women not to get involved with these men.
In 2006, a profile was posted to the site that profiled Pennsylvania criminal defense attorney Todd J. Hollis, alleging (among other things) that Hollis has fathered multiple children, has herpes, transmitted a sexually transmitted disease to an anonymous user of the site, and that Hollis is either gay or bisexual.
According to the lawsuit, Hollis contacted the site’s owner, Tasha C. Joseph and told her that the allegations posted in his profile were false. Joseph, however, refused to remove the postings, which lead Hollis to sue her both as an individual and as the owner of the website, claiming defamation.
In his lawsuit, Hollis also targeted seven site users, five of whom remain anonymous. Hollis filed his case in Allegheny County, relying on the case Mar-Eco v. T&R Sons Towing and Recovery, in which a Pennsylvania court found that it had jurisdiction over a motor vehicle dealer in Maryland, because of its “presence in Pennsylvania through its Internet website.”
Hollis argued that under Pennsylvania’s Long-Arm Act, and under the reasoning in Mar-Eco, Judge Wittick’s court could assert jurisdiction in the case.
Judge Wittick, however, found that the facts in this case differed substantially from the facts in Mar-Eco, ultimately determining that the defendants in this case simply didn’t do enough business in Pennsylvania to give his court jurisdiction in the case.
“In the present case, the Joseph Defendants do not perform a significant amount of commercial business over the Internet,” Judge Wittick wrote in his decision. “Thus, the website is insufficient to establish general personal jurisdiction ‘because it [is] simply general advertising with the added convenience of an online registry.’”
Joseph’s attorney, Robert L. Byer, told The Legal Intelligencer that he focused his arguments on both the jurisdictional issue, and on First Amendment grounds under the Communications Decency Act (CDA).
Byer said he based his defense on USC 47 §230(c)1, which holds that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
In his ruling, though, Judge Wittick didn’t address Byer’s CDA argument at all; rather, the judge simply ruled on the jurisdictional question, which left the CDA questions unanswered.
“The judge made it clear that he wanted to try to rule on jurisdiction without considering the application of the Communications Decency Act,” said Byer.
Byer added that although he hasn’t heard anything about whether Hollis intends to appeal the ruling, there are unresolved claims involving one of the defendants that Byer does not represent, who allegedly posted information to Hollis’ profile.
Joseph also filed a counterclaim for abuse of process, stemming from the fact that Hollis had a sheriff serve her while she was at work, and allegedly arranged for television camera crews to be there, as well.
Hollis filed a preliminary objection to the counterclaim, which has not yet been resolved; Byer said the pending counterclaim and objection thereto could delay any forthcoming appeal of Judge Wittick’s ruling.
