United States District Court, N.D. California
ORDER GRANTING MOTIONS TO DISMISS WITH LEAVE TO AMEND
RE: DKT. NOS. 31, 33
William H. Orrick United States District Judge
INTRODUCTION
UAB
Planner 5D (“Planner 5D”) brings copyright
infringement and trade secret misappropriations claims
against Facebook, Inc., Facebook Technologies, LLC
(collectively “Facebook”), and The Trustees of
Princeton University (“Princeton”). Complaint
(“Compl.”) [Dkt. No. 1]. Planner 5D operates a
home design website that allows users to create virtual
interior design scenes using a library of virtual objects
(such as tables, chairs, and sofas) to populate the scenes.
It claims that it owns copyrights in these three-dimensional
objects and scenes, and in the compilation of objects and
scenes, as well as trade secrets in the underlying data files
of these objects and scenes.
Princeton
and Facebook move to dismiss for failure to state a claim,
and I will GRANT their motions. Planner 5D does not
sufficiently allege a copyright infringement claim because it
does not allege: (i) that it has met the threshold
registration requirement of 17 U.S.C. § 411(a) or that
it is exempt from that requirement as a non-United States
work; (ii) the originality or creativity of the objects,
scenes, and compilations of objects and scenes; and (iii)
that copyrightable elements were copied. Planner 5D also
fails to sufficiently allege a trade secret misappropriation
claim because it does not explain: (i) how the structure of
its website and the Terms of Services maintained secrecy of
the underlying data files of the objects and scenes; and (ii)
what improper means Princeton and Facebook took to obtain
these files. Planner 5D may have leave to amend to address
these deficiencies.
BACKGROUND
I.
FACTUAL BACKGROUND
A.
Planner 5D's Home Design Website
In
2011, Planner 5D created a website that it describes as a
“user-friendly home design tool that allowed anyone to
quickly and easily create their own home, office or landscape
designs.” Compl. ¶ 27. Planner 5D offers its users
access to a digital library of thousands of household
objects, including “structural features, ”
“furniture, ” “bathroom appurtenances,
” “electrical appliances, ” and
“exterior features.” Id. Users can
create unique designs by “simply dragging any of these
objects onto or around a chosen floor plan.”
Id. Once added to a design, these objects can be
“easily moved, rotated, tilted, re-sized, or otherwise
manipulated to create the desired design.” Id.
Users can also “easily toggle between two- and
three-dimensional renderings of the design, ” and can
rotate and tilt three-dimensional renderings “to any
desired perspective.” Id. Planner 5D claims
that it currently has over 40 million users worldwide and
that it owns “a collection of over a million
hand-crafted, digitized, and realistic three-dimensional
objects and scenes, depicting a wide variety of household and
office designs.” Id. ¶¶ 5, 28.
1.
Alleged Copyright in Objects and Compilation of
Objects
Planner
5D alleges that it created the “library of realistic,
digitized objects over a span of more than seven years, at
the cost of millions of dollars.” Compl. ¶ 29. The
library consists of over 4, 500 objects. Id. Planner
5D contends that it holds copyright in “[e]ach object
individually, and the compilation of objects together,
” as well as in “the data files underlying each
object, and in the compilation of individual data
files.” Id. All of these works were allegedly
“authored in Europe or Russia, ” and
“neither Planner 5D nor any individual object modelers
are nationals, domiciliaries, or habitual residents of the
U.S., or legal entities with headquarters in the U.S.”
Id.
2.
Alleged Copyright in Scenes and Compilation of
Scenes
Planner
5D also alleges that it owns copyright in the
“compilation of design scenes made from arrangements of
these individual objects.” Compl. ¶ 30. These
“scenes” consist of “floor plans created
within the Planner 5D application using Planner 5D's
objects.” Id. Planner 5D contends that each
scene in its collection “was individually created by a
human designer, ” and the compilation of scenes now
includes over 1, 000, 000 scenes. Id. All of these
works were allegedly “authored in Europe by Planner 5D,
” which is a “Lithuanian corporation not
headquartered in the U.S.” Id.
3.
Alleged Trade Secret in Underlying Data Files
In
addition to the copyrights Planner 5D claims it owns in the
objects and scenes, it also claims that the vast collection
of underlying data files of these objects and scenes are
confidential and proprietary trade secrets of the company.
Compl. ¶ 33. These trade secrets and Planner 5D's
copyrights “are the company's core assets.”
Id.
4.
Access to Planner 5D's Objects and Scenes
Planner
5D claims that third parties can only access its objects and
scenes “using Planner 5D's proprietary
software” by navigating to the company's website,
found at https://planner5d.com/. Compl. ¶
31.[1]
It contends in Paragraph 32 of the Complaint that its
“terms of services and the structures of [its] website
prohibit users from directly accessing, downloading, or
otherwise using the data files defining Planner 5D's
objects and scenes.” Id. ¶ 32. It further
asserts that users “may never . . . access, use, or
download the underlying data files, ” and may never
“make their own copies of the three-dimensional
renderings of these files, [and] not use the renderings other
than while on Planner 5D's website designing floor
plans.” Id. Paragraph 32 is the only paragraph
in the Complaint that mentions the “structure” of
Planner 5D's website. The Complaint does not allege how
the “structure” of its website prevents users
from accessing its objects and scenes and/or its underlying
data files.
Planner
5D's Terms of Service prohibit use of any
“‘page-scrape,' ‘robot,'
‘spider[, ]' or other automatic device, program,
algorithm or methodology which perform[s] similar functions[,
] to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of the
Planner 5D project.” Compl. ¶ 45. The Terms also
prohibit “download[ing] (other than page caching) any
portion of the Planner 5D project, the Materials or any
information contained therein or use [of] the Planner 5D
project or the Materials other than for their intended
purposes.” Id.[2]
5.
Planner 5D Evolves Into Artificial Intelligence and Scene
Recognition
Planner
5D alleges that since its founding in 2011, the company's
core business objective evolved from providing home design
tools “to becoming the leader and innovator in computer
scene recognition.” Compl. ¶ 34. Scene-recognition
technology is the ability of machines to recognize
three-dimensional scenes. Id. ¶ 1. It has been
estimated that the computer vision market will reach $48
billion by 2023, and $60 billion by 2025. Id.
There
is a major roadblock in developing this technology - finding
enough data. Id. ¶¶ 2, 37. Teaching
machines to recognize three-dimensional settings requires
“feeding them large volumes of realistic, digitized
renderings of such places-digitalized doors, walls,
furniture, and the like, arranged into plausible interiors
and rendered in three dimensions.” Id. Planner
5D claims that creating lifelike digital scenes is
“extremely time- and labor-intensive, ” and that
to create truly “realistic” scenes, “human
designers must arrange the objects in real-life
configurations.” Id. “Large collections
of these kinds of three-dimensional settings are thus
exceedingly rare.” Id.
Planner
5D cites a presentation by a senior Princeton computer
scientist who stated that “data” is the main
roadblock for 3D scene understanding and research.
Id. ¶ 4. Accordingly, Planner 5D argues that
its vast collection of objects and scenes, estimated at over
a million, have become more valuable over time as “no
other collection in the world numbers even in the tens of
thousands.” Id. ¶ 5. It maintains that
over the past several years it has “invested
significantly in developing algorithms that capitalize on
[its] catalog of three-dimensional files to achieve
market-leading 3D recognition.” Id. ¶ 35.
B.
Princeton Downloads Planner 5D's Data to Create the SUNCG
Dataset
Planner
5D alleges that computer scientists at Princeton “were
eager to use this uniquely large, uniquely realistic
collection of data, ” and “decided to download
the entirety of Planner 5D's data collection.”
Compl. ¶ 6. It claims that its data is especially
desirable given that its objects and scenes are designed by
humans, making it more likely to be “realistic, ”
a feature vital for accurate scene-recognition technology.
Id. ¶ 39.
The
method by which Princeton allegedly downloaded Planner
5D's data is contested. Planner 5D claims that Princeton
“created computer code that crawled through thousands
or tens of thousands of pages within Planner 5D's
servers, progressively cataloging the locations of all
available objects and scenes.” Id.
¶¶ 6, 43. Through this method, which Planner 5D
characterizes as “scrap[ing]” for data, ”
Princeton was able to download over five gigabytes of data,
including 2, 644 of Planner 5D's objects and 45, 622 of
its scenes. Id. ¶¶ 6, 7, 43. Together,
Planner 5D alleges that Princeton scraped each of the over
48, 000 desired files from Planner 5D's servers.
Id. ¶ 43.
Planner
5D claims that Princeton then used this scraped data to
bolster its scene-recognition activities. Compl. ¶ 7.
Princeton researchers “did not disguise” that the
data they used in research was derived from Planner 5D's
website. Id. (citing to a research article by
Princeton that states “We use a collection of 3D scene
models downloaded from the Planner 5D website”). Not
only did Princeton use this data for their own research
purposes, but Planner 5D also claims that Princeton posted
the data to a publicly-accessible Princeton URL and labeled
it the “SUNCG dataset.” Id. ¶ 8. It
states that more than 99.9% of the files in the SUNCG dataset
are identical copies of files from Planner 5D's
collection, with only a few that have been slightly altered.
Id. ¶ 44. Some of the SUNCG dataset's files
“even continue to bear Planner 5D's registered
trademark.” Id. Planner 5D claims that these
actions by Princeton both violate its Terms of Service and
the “structure” of its website. Id.
¶¶ 32, 45.
C.
Facebook Uses the SUNCG Dataset for its SUMO Challenge and
Other Object-Recognition Projects
Planner
5D claims that Facebook was also interested in its objects
and scenes collection that would help it tap into the
commercial potential of scene recognition technology. Compl.
¶¶ 9, 46. Facebook launched an international
scene-recognition competition, called the Scene Understanding
and Modelling Challenge (“SUMO Challenge”), which
encouraged entrants to submit scene-recognition papers and
algorithms for the chance of winning cash prizes and speaking
at a “SUMO Challenge conference.” Id.
¶¶ 10, 11, 47. Planner 5D alleges that Facebook
facilitated contestants' work by providing them with a
copy of the SUNCG dataset, which it published on a URL
belonging to Stanford University. Id. ¶¶
11, 51. It claims that Facebook, aided by others including
Stanford and Princeton, made its own copy of the Princeton
SUNCG dataset. Id. ¶ 51. Planner 5D believes
that “dozens of copies or more of this copy of the
SUNCG dataset have been downloaded and used, by an unknown
number of users.” Id. Current and former
Stanford and Princeton researches have also served as SUMO
Challenge organizers, advisors, or program committee
members.” Id. ΒΆ 48. Planner 5D further
alleges that both defendants are connected because
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