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Submitted via IRC for FatPhil
Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF's advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle's website in a manner it didn't like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website's terms of use is not a crime under the federal computer crime statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But some companies, like Oracle, turned to state computer crime statutes—in this case, California and Nevada—to enforce their computer use preferences.
This decision shores up the good precedent from 2012 and makes clear—if it wasn't clear already—that violating a corporate computer use policy is not a crime.
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Ninth Circuit Doubles Down: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday January 11 2018, @09:45PM (1 child)
That would require giving access only to the registered users - who during sign-up confirmed the contract in some meaningful way. Every company that has anything to keep private does that. Try to get some datasheets without signing up, or some 3D models... Registration at professional, industrial websites is expected because in return you get information that is not obtainable otherwise, anywhere.
A user of a regular website does not achieve informed consent because he does not read the conditions and does not have to accept the offer. In your own example "The user agrees to the usage contract, and in return gets to use the website" the user can easily not agree to the contract and still use the website. To block the alternative the regular website has to be converted to "registered users only" - and the visitor count will drop to 1% of the previous number because nobody is going to register to just read an article. The attention span of an Internet user is 5 seconds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @09:50PM
The only problem is one of enforcement. As someone else noted, a restaurant that gives out free bread shouldn't surprised that some people abuse its resources.
There's nothing inherently non-binding about a Terms of Service; it's just not practical to enforce in the case that you outlined, and part of the government has now explicitly stated that you cannot use its CRIMINAL JUSTICE machinery to enforce it either.