In the absence of evidence of an actual purchase by a Massachusetts resident and any direct attempts to attract their business, the court said that it could not enforce allegations of trade mark infringement and anti-competitive conduct by an Illinois-based business.
Wildfire, a telecoms business based in Massachusetts, had sued Grapevine, a web services business based in Illinois which operated from the domain name wildfire.net and other domain names. According to the decision, Grapevine’s links to Massachusetts were limited to three web pages accessible form the state, a contract with a Massachusets company for the sale of a domain name and a one-off sale of advertising space to a company based in the state. The court wrote,
"Massachusetts residents could theoretically purchase [Grapevine's] services off of its Wakeupmoney.com web page or utilise the free services of GolfTracker.com, but the existence of the pages alone, without any evidence of actual purchases by Massachusetts customers or direct solicitation of Massachusetts customers, is not sufficient to satisfy the 'minimum contacts' required."
