Group items tagged

prcode 34931845011 MA sequence I was reading Eric Ostroff's fine post discussing customer lists as trade secrets, in the context of a recent case involving Farmers Insurance Exchange and several of its former agents, Farmers Ins. Exch. v. Steele Ins. Agency, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 70098 (E.D. Cal. May 16, 2013). prcode 34931845011 MA sequence I was reading Eric Ostroff's fine post discussing customer lists as trade secrets, in the context of a recent case involving Farmers Insurance Exchange and several of its former agents, Farmers Ins. Exch. v. Steele Ins. Agency, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 70098 (E.D. Cal. May 16, 2013). The trade secret at issue in that case involved an electronic compilation of data about insurance customers. Farmers maintains that compilation for its captive agents through something called an "Agency Dashboard." In the captive insurance setting, the insurer normally owns proprietary rights to its customer information. This is in stark contrast to the independent agency system, where the agents themselves retain rights to such data. Eric does a nice job summarizing the steps Farmers takes to protect its customer data, including the requirement that agents log in with passwords each time they gain access to the database. They must, as Eric points out, acknowledge Farmers' proprietary rights upon entry to Farmers' dashboard system. Full disclosure, now. I litigated several matters against Farmers Insurance over the years. And I am well-familiar with the way in which Farmers pursues trade secrets cases against ex-agents, and all too familiar with the Agency Dashboard, what it looks like, and how it works. So I won't summarize what Eric wrote, but instead I want to highlight a fact that came up in the case and try to apply a claim Farmers hasn't (yet?) pursued. Yes, I am talking about our old pal, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. At least two of the defendants in the Farmers' case used passwords that did not belong to them to access Agency D