In IMS Health v. Ayotte, 550 F.3d 42 (1st Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 2009 U.S. LEXIS 4744 (2009), the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the New Hampshire law that bans the sale of prescriber-identifiable prescription drug data for marketing purposes. The New Hampshire legislature unanimously passed the Prescription Confidentiality Act preventing data brokers from collecting prescriber-identifiable and prescription information and selling such information to pharmaceutical companies to influence physicians' prescribing habits. The District Court held that the state's Prescription Confidentiality Act violated the First Amendment and improperly restricted commercial speech rights of data brokers and pharmaceutical companies. In an appeal to the First Circuit, EPIC and 16 privacy and technology experts submitted a friend of the Court brief urging a reversal of the lower court ruling. The EPIC brief argued that the substantial privacy interest in de-identified patient data was not considered by the lower court. The privacy interest, in part flows from the realities that data may not be, in fact, truly de-identified, and that de-identified data does impact actual individuals. In November 2008, the First Circuit reversed the ruling and in June 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the challenge to the Prescription Confidentiality Act.