Increasingly, we are seeing email used in cases involving defendants located in foreign countries. Plaintiffs filed suit against four Defendants: Qingdao Sunflare New Energy Co., Skone Lighting Co., Sailing Motor Co., and Guangzhou LF Sky Energy Technology Co., serving all defendants via email. Plaintiff subsequently filed a motion with the court requesting an order deeming the service effectuated via email. The court granted the motion with respect to defendants Guangzhou and Qingdao, but denied the motion with respect to the other two defendants without prejudice.

With permission of the court, plaintiffs then submitted the following supplemental evidence as to why the motion should also be granted for the other two defendants: Lighting held out the email address at issue as its preferred contact information. The same address was provided to a website domain registrar in its website registration materials. Additionally, email tracking measures utilized by plaintiffs indicate that emails to the Skone Lighting email address were sent successfully, and no “bounceback” was received that would have suggested that email was not delivered.

The situation involving Sailing Motor was similar. The email address appears on Sailing Motor’s price sheet. A man who identified himself as the owner of the company provided the email address as the company’s contact information to plaintiffs’ investigators, and plaintiffs’ investigators communicated via that email address to facilitate the purchase of allegedly infringing products.

Upon reconsideration, do you think the court granted or denied the plaintiff’s motion? Why or why not?