I ran across a rather strange ruling out of the United States Court of Appeals today. McCready v. eBay at first seems just kind of funny. An accused eBay crook, McCready, has filed multiple lawsuits against eBay and third parties in an apparent attempt to either win back his good name from slanderous feedbacks on eBay or further disgrace himself with frivolous, and potentially sanctionable, “abuse of process”.

The Court really lays onto Mr. McCready, and from what they describe, he might even have earned it. The court, however, treats McCready’s claims against eBay under the Fair Credit Reporting Act somewhat flippantly.

The FCRA protect consumers from agencies that “regularly engage[] in … the practice of assembling or evaluating consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purposes of furnishing consumer reports to third parties” 15 U.S.C. 1681(a)(f). McCready claimed that the eBay Feedback Forum was a “consumer report” for the purposes of the act.

This doesn’t seem crazy to me. Mob judgemental behavior on the Internet is getting out of hand. Cellphone pictures of a subway pervert start off reasonably, hounding someone who stole your cellphone seems amusing, but flash mobs in China can attack and harass adultering men and women. As we start to place substantial value in peer generated social status quantified on the Internet, we’re going to need protections.
The court rejected Mr. McCready’s FCRA theory by ruling that the eBay feedback was not a “consumer report,” but their ruling has an odd twist. The court found that a consumer, under the FCRA “must, at minimum, be an identifiable person.” Since the eBay forum uses “users’ self-anointed ‘usernames’” the court found that the users were anonymous outside of eBay and thus not consumers under the Act.

This can’t make any sense. The identity that links a consumer report with a credit agency is an arbitrary set of strings, such as SSN and DOB. Granted, they’re globally identifying in a way that an eBay ID, in theory, is not. But simply because an identity is fractured into multiple spaces, each with a different recognition mechanism, shouldn’t imply that the same reputation values aren’t carried into each space.

Bad cases make bad law, they say. Hopefully courts will look into online rating systems somewhat more carefully when more legitimate claims arise.

Anyone seen any other cases like this?

Posted by M in Internet Policy, Identity, Recent Decisions, Information Law