CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) - A Chicago federal judge won't second-guess herself for tossing a proposed class action lawsuit that accused Ancestry.com of violating the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.
The suit concerned old yearbook photos the company used when advertising its pay service. In September, Judge Virginia Kendall granted summary judgment to Ancestry, finding plaintiff lawyers failed to work around the IRPA's one-year statute of limitations.
They tried to argue each payment Ancestry made to a company that licenses yearbook names and images started the statute over. Lawyers at Clifford Law Offices, Morgan and Morgan and Bursor & Fisher filed a motion for reconsideration that was rejected May 23.
They said the Illinois Supreme Court's recent ruling in Tims v. Black Horse Carriers, which denied a one-year statute of limitation on cases brought under the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act.
"Unlike the BIPA, the IRPA protects the publication of matters related to the right of privacy and, thus, falls under the one-year statute of limitations," Kendall wrote. "Simply consider the law's name. The legislature titled the statute the 'Illinois Right of Publicity Act.'
"That the law protects the publication of private information is immediately apparent. The legislative text teaches the same lesson."
Kendall had already thrown out claims under Illinois' Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act in late 2021.
IRPA has no express statute of limitations, but a federal court in July 2019 determined it was one year because IRPA "completely supplanted the common-law tort of appropriation of likeness," which has a one-year statute.