• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 2, 2014

A federal judge in Seattle has dismissed a potential class-action lawsuit accusing ESPN of violating a federal video privacy law by transmitting information about some users to Adobe.

In a ruling issued last week, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly said that Washington resident Chad Eichenberger's court papers didn't include enough facts to back up his claim that ESPN disclosed his name.

Eichenberger alleged that ESPN transmitted the serial number of his Roku — the device that enabled him to watch the videos — to Adobe, which allegedly used the data for analytics.

Zilly said in a written opinion that transmitting that type of “anonymous” data doesn't violate the Video Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits video rental companies from disclosing users' personally identifiable information. Congress passed the law in 1988, after a Washington D.C. newspaper obtained and published the video rental records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

Zilly said in his ruling that ESPN potentially could be liable if it disclosed both a unique identifier and a “correlated look-up table.” But Zilly added that Eichenberger's complaint didn't offer enough facts to support the theory that Adobe has that kind of a table.

“Even if Adobe does 'possess a wealth of information' about individual consumers, it is speculative to state that it can, and does, identify specific persons as having watched or requested specific video materials,” Zilly wrote.

The ruling was without prejudice, meaning that Eichenberger can beef up his allegations and try again.

ESPN isn't the only company facing a lawsuit alleging that it violated the VPPA. Dow Jones is facing a similar lawsuit, as are CNN and Hulu.

A federal judge in Atlanta recently dismissed a lawsuit alleging that the Cartoon Network violated the video privacy law by transmitting Android IDs to the analytics company Bango. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Thrash ruled in that case that Android IDs don't identify specific users. The consumer who brought that case is appealing the decision.