Somehow I missed the Court of Appeal's opinion in Overstock.com, Inc. v. Gradient Analytics, Inc., 151 Cal.App.4th 688 (2007), which the First Appellate District, Division Four handed down on May 30, 2007.
Overstock.com was decided in the context of an anti-SLAPP motion and contains several noteworthy rulings relating to the UCL. First, the Court of Appeal determined that conduct "likely to deceive a reasonable consumer" was actionable under the UCL even if the reasonable consumer is someone other than the plaintiff — in this case, potential investors in the plaintiff's stock. Overstock.com, 151 Cal.App.4th at 714.
Second, the Court of Appeal determined that securities transactions are not excluded from the UCL's coverage, declining to follow Bowen v. Ziasun Technologies, Inc., 116 Cal.App.4th 777 (2004), on this point:
"The UCL contains no language supporting an exclusion for securities, and under the plain language of the UCL, we cannot create such an exclusion." .... Indeed the sweeping language of the UCL is intended " ' to permit tribunals to enjoin on-going wrongful business conduct in whatever context such activity might occur.' "
Id. at 715-16 (quoting Cel-Tech Communications, Inc. v. Los Angeles Cellular Telephone Co., 20 Cal.4th. 163, 181 (1999); Roskind v. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., 80 Cal.App.4th 345, 355 (2000)). (For more discussion of the UCL and securities claims, see this blog post.)
The Court also noted that "the California UCL contains no directive to interpret our consumer protection statute consistently with the FTC Act." Id. at 715. This holding tends to undermine Camacho v. Automobile Club of Southern California, 142 Cal.App.4th 1394, 1403 (2006), in which the Court of Appeal relied on the FTC Act in adopting a third formulation of the UCL's "unfair" prong.
Finally, the Court of Appeal held that the plaintiff satisified the Prop. 64 "injury in fact" requirement by alleging that the defendant's unfair, unlawful and fraudulent conduct "result[ed] in diminution in value of its assets and decline in its market capitalization and other vested interests. This meets the statutory requirement of 'injury in fact' resulting from defendants' misconduct." Overstock.com, 151 Cal.App.4th at 716. This holding is directly contrary to at least one federal decision, Walker v. USAA Casualty Ins. Co., 474 F.Supp.2d 1168 (E.D. Cal. 2007), in which the court held that to qualify as "injury in fact," the monetary loss must also be recoverable as "restitution" under the UCL. As I have explained before, that holding seemed to me contrary to the plain language of Prop. 64, and Overstock.com confirms this.
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