• Technology & Marketing Law Blog, Monday, November 2, 2015 1:58 PM

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit alleging that Disney violated the Video Privacy Protection Act by disclosing a hashed serial number of users' Roku devices to Adobe. The judge said that companies can't identify individuals based solely on their devices' serial number.

The VPPA -- which was passed after a newspaper obtained the video rental records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork -- prohibits video providers from disclosing personally identifiable information about the movies people watch.

Internet legal expert Venkat Balasubramani writes that the allegations against Disney "present a good case of statutory ambiguity."

"It is simplistic to say that the VPPA requires someone to be identified by name. Even in Judge Bork’s era, one can envision how he could have been identified without actually having been named ('check out the profile and viewing habits of a key Supreme Court nominee!')," he writes. "Fast forward 25 years later, and this ability to identify someone with a piece of ancillary information is much greater."

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