Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co.’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

7 federal appellate · 4 district · 9 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 35 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Hately v. Watts · Commonwealth v. Fulgiam

2. “Arch Wireless contends that our analysis in Theofel of the definition of “backup protection” supports its position. There, we noted that “[w]here the underlying message has expired in the normal course, any copy is no longer performing any backup function. An ISP that kept permanent copies of temporary messages could not fairly be described as ‘backing up’ those messages.” [Theofel, 359 F.3d] at 1070. Thus, the argument goes, Arch Wireless’s permanent retention of the [plaintiffs’] text messages could not have been for backup purposes; instead, it must have been for storage purposes, which would require us to classify Arch Wireless as an RCS. This reading is not persuasive. First, there is no indication in the record that Arch Wireless retained a permanent copy of the text messages or stored them for the benefit of the City; instead, the [declaration of an Arch Wireless employee] simply states that copies of the messages are “archived” on Arch Wireless’s server. More importantly, Theofel’s holding — that the e-mail messages stored on [the ISP’s] server after delivery were for “backup protection,” and that [the ISP] was undisputedly an ECS — forecloses Arch Wireless’s position.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Flagg ex rel. Bond v. City of Detroit

3. “"Congress created a second category covering 'remote computing services’ to address third-party service providers that offered 'sophisticated and convenient computing services to subscribers and customers from remote facilities.’ Buying a lot of processing or storage capacity was prohibitively expensive for many organizations in 1986. Outsourcing these functions to a service provider, however, created economies of scale that offered a sustainable cost structure for the new technology.... A company or organization that decided to outsource its computing needs would transmit its data for processing either to a third-party service provider’s personnel or directly transfer it to the provider's remote computer.... Congress included the category of [RCS] in the Stored Communications Act to ensure the privacy of data outsourced to these third-party service providers.... The requirements for RCS precisely describe the nature of the commercial relationship that existed at the time of the Act's adoption between the outsourced computing providers and their business clientele.” Robison, supra, at 1207.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 717 F. Supp. 2d 965 - Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc.