Register.com v. Verio
The 2004 case in which terms shown only after each whois reply still bound a party that had queried thousands of times and therefore knew exactly what they said.
Verio ran robots that harvested contact details from Register.com's whois database so it could pitch web services to newly registered domain owners by phone and email. Every reply ended with terms forbidding exactly that kind of mass marketing. Verio's position was that it had never agreed to anything, since nobody had clicked a button.
The Second Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Pierre Leval, found the argument thin coming from someone who had read the same text with every query. A party that repeatedly takes a service on known terms cannot pretend each visit is the first. The court also upheld a trespass-to-chattels claim. A consumer visiting once is in a different position, as Specht and Nguyen show.