Intellectual Property & Technology Blog

How a 1967 Telephone Statute Became a $5,000-a-Click Litigation Machine, and Why Sacramento’s Fix Only Solves Part of the Problem

On January 27 and 28, 2025, two California Superior Court judges ruled on the same legal theory a day apart and reached opposite conclusions. In Sanchez v. Cars.com, Inc. and Aviles v. LiveRamp, Inc., both courts held that California’s pen register and trap-and-trace statute, written for telephone lines, does not reach a website’s collection of a visitor’s IP address and device identifiers. Other courts, on nearly identical facts, have let the ...