Golden Unicorn Enterprises, Inc. v. Audible, Inc.

Background

Audible asked for permission to file certain exhibits to its opposition under seal or in redacted form. It also asked to seal its opposition and all exhibits temporarily while the plaintiffs reviewed the materials and potentially moved to seal or redact them.

Audible’s request covered several categories of information:

- Proposed expert reports containing sensitive information from Audible’s documents and witness depositions, including information about ACX creators, internal strategy, publishers who were not parties, royalty calculations, financial systems, and royalty earners who were not parties. - An internal financial analysis containing ACX purchases, returns, royalties, and average per-user and rights-holder royalty information from 2015 through 2021. - Detailed royalty information for the named plaintiffs. - Information about non-parties, including customer information, employee names and email addresses, and information about other authors and non-parties. - Personally identifying information in customer emails and customer-service chat transcripts. - Names, email addresses, book titles, and other information about authors and representatives of other companies in documents involving the plaintiffs.

Audible argued that disclosure could cause competitive harm or invade the privacy of non-parties. The request concerned materials submitted in connection with the plaintiffs’ class-certification motion.

Ruling

The court stated that the motion to seal was “granted temporarily.” It said it would assess whether the materials should remain sealed or redacted when deciding the underlying motion. The Clerk of Court was directed to terminate ECF No. 163.

The order did not make a final decision that the materials must remain sealed or redacted. It also did not decide the underlying class-certification motion.