Arguments that just don't cut it (Part II)

Here's the second installment of the bad arguments collection. It's not that they are entirely implausible, but just that courts are not likely to believe and use as evidence, for example, that dogs can sense the act of wiretapping.

• Plaintiff claimed he knew that HP was checking his voicemail in violation of the Wiretap Act when his "German shepherd, Duke, had his ears perked and was staring wildly at Plaintiff's Motorola router." Dunahoo v. Hewlett-Packard Co., 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7717 (S.D.N.Y. 2012).
• Eight months after defendant's house was foreclosed upon, the new owner found his collection of child pornography in the flue of the chimney. The defendant argued that he had an expectation of privacy in the disks as they were not abandoned. The judge held, "It is unclear to me exactly when defendant planned to try to retrieve these disks, and it is ridiculous to think that he had any privacy interest in these disks which were sitting in someone else's house for this length of time." United States v. Larson, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 139566 (W.D. Mo. 2011).
• Plaintiff argued that they cannot be required to disclose data from their social media accounts to the defendants during discovery because it would violate the Stored Communications Act. Unfortunately for the plaintiff, the SCA only prohibits unauthorized access and does not apply to the user himself. In re Air Crash near Clarence Ctr., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 146551 (W.D.N.Y. 2011).

Click here for Part I.