C-SPAN Scores Win on Motion to Dismiss VPPA Claim

On March 9, 2026, in Horan, et al. v. National Cable Satellite Corporation, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell granted C-SPAN’s motion to dismiss a proposed class action accusing the nonprofit public affairs network of sharing information about website visitors’ video viewing habits via Meta Pixel in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Lawyers from Ballard Spahr’s Privacy and Data Security Group represented C-SPAN in securing the dismissal in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

C-SPAN argued that the claim should be dismissed because the plaintiffs failed to allege that (1) they were “consumers” protected by the VPPA and (2) their “personally identifiable information” (PII) had been disclosed. Judge Howell agreed and dismissed the action.

The VPPA limits its protections to consumers, which it defines as “any renter, purchaser, or subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider.” The plaintiffs claimed that they were "subscribers" and, therefore, "consumers" because they signed up for digital newsletters and registered for MyC-SPAN accounts. The court held that neither the digital newsletters nor the MyC-SPAN accounts were sufficient to make the plaintiffs subscribers to defendant’s video content or consumers under the VPPA. In reaching this conclusion, the court relied on the D.C. Circuit’s binding decision in Pileggi v. Washington Newspaper Publishing Co., 146 F.4^th 1219 (D.C. Cir. 2025) and also considered the multifactor test articulated by the 11th Circuit in Ellis v. Cartoon Network, Inc., 803 F.3d 1251 (11^th Cir. 2015), to analyze whether the plaintiffs had the requisite “ongoing relationship or commitment” to C-SPAN to qualify as subscribers.

The court also ruled that the plaintiffs failed to adequately allege that C-SPAN’s use of Meta Pixel on its website disclosed their PII, which the VPPA defines as “information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services.” Adopting the “ordinary person” test applied by the Second, Third, and Ninth Circuits, and declining to follow the First Circuit’s broader standard, the court held that PII encompasses only information that would allow an ordinary person to identify an individual’s video-watching behavior. Applying this standard and drawing from the Second Circuit’s decision in Solomon v. Flipps Media, Inc., 136 F.4^th 41 (2d Cir. 2025), the court concluded that PII was not disclosed because an ordinary consumer could not extract and decipher an individual’s viewing behavior from the encoded query string parameters and cookie values transmitted by Meta Pixel.

Looking Ahead

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Salazar v. Paramount Global to address a circuit split on the definition of consumer under the VPPA but has declined to review the question of what constitutes PII under the VPPA, denying certiorari in Solomon v. Flipps Media, Inc., and Hughes v. NFL and leaving the ordinary-person standard intact in the courts that have adopted it.

We will continue to monitor and provide updates on these and other VPPA developments.

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