Google Urges 9th Circuit to Affirm YouTube's Compliance With Ore. Auto-Renewal Law

YouTube’s subscription service offers, as the district court observed, contain the terms required under Oregon’s Automatic Renewal Law (ARL) and Free Offer Law (FOL) because their disclosures are made in a clear and conspicuous manner, and because they satisfy the statutory consent and cancellation requirements, said Google’s answering brief Tuesday (docket 23-35465) at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Plaintiff-appellants Victor Walkingeagle, Nathan Briggs and Donald Molina contend that the district court erred June 13 when it granted YouTube’s motion to dismiss their second amended complaint for violations of the two Oregon statutes (see 2311210030). But as the district court found, their complaint “suffers a fundamental defect,” said Google’s answering brief. While the plaintiffs “pile on conclusory statements” that YouTube violated the statutes, the actual screenshots they include in their complaint “show, on their face, that YouTube is in compliance,” it said. The ARL and FOL “impose specific, straightforward requirements,” which YouTube adheres to, said the brief. YouTube displays a simple, uncluttered checkout page to customers describing what they are signing up for, the price, when billing starts, and their ability to cancel at any time, it said. These terms are displayed in “readable type and understandable language, devoid of distractions,” and all immediately above a big blue button users can click to accept, it said. If they do, they get an email spelling these details out again, and giving them a hyperlink to a page where they can cancel, it said. All of this is apparent from the face of the plaintiffs’ own complaint and screenshot images of the challenged checkout pages, it said. But the plaintiffs still maintain that the district court was wrong in concluding that the challenged disclosures satisfy the legal requirements of the ARL and FOL, it said. Rather than applying the statutes, as written, to the disclosures, as presented in the plaintiffs’ complaint, the plaintiffs urge the 9th Circuit to take two tacks, it said. They first want the court to read “imagined duties and technical rules into the statutes,” and then also credit “their threadbare allegations characterizing YouTube’s disclosures and email acknowledgments over the documents themselves,” it said. The district court rejected these “gambits,” and the 9th Circuit “should as well,” it said.