A prominent expert witness for plaintiffs in products liability cases has lost his bid to hold two law firms liable for allegedly hacking into his password-protected Web site and using the contents against him in litigation. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., threw out the lawsuit filed against Keller & Heckman and Jones Day by David Egilman, an associate professor at Brown University who has testified for plaintiffs in asbestos and other toxic-tort cases.
Egilman claimed the defendants violated two federal statutes — the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — by accessing his Web site via a username and password he had given to a third party. Although the username and password were valid, Egilman said the defendants did not have authorization to use them. . . .
[T]he defendants allegedly downloaded materials from the site and used them to impeach Egilman's credibility in [two] lawsuits and to convince the Colorado judge to sanction him for violating the court order.
The District Court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss the complaint.
Details here from Andrews Publications via Findlaw.com.