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Ninth Circuit Doubles Down: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 11 2018, @08:38PM   
from the clarifying-things dept.

"MrPlow" writes:

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.

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/ninth-circuit-doubles-down-violating-websites-terms-service-not-crime

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Original Submission

• Re:re Terms Re:re Terms (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:03PM (1 child)

  by frojack (1554) on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:03PM (#621127) Journal

  In this particular case, the website was being accessed by the defendant using a valid customer ID, so clearly it was authorized to use the website.

  Exactly.

  They had valid access.

  They broke house rules. So kick them off, and the matter is finished, there is no recourse to the courts for this.

  The panel reversed the district court’s judgment after
  trial with respect to Oracle’s claims under the California
  Comprehensive Data Access and Fraud Act, the Nevada
  Computer Crimes Law, and California’s Unfair Competition
  Law. The panel held that taking data from a website, using
  a method prohibited by the applicable terms of use, when the
  taking itself generally is permitted, does not violate the
  CDAFA or the NCCL.

  Now Oracle still won a copyright terms violation portion, but the
  penalties were tossed out.

  The panel affirmed the district court’s partial summary
  judgment and partial judgment after trial on Oracle’s claims
  that Rimini infringed its copyright by copying under the
  license of one customer for work performed for other
  existing customers or for unknown or future customers,
  rather than restricting such copying to work for that
  particular customer. The panel concluded that Rimini’s
  activities were not permissible under the terms of the
  licenses Oracle granted to its customers.

  So Rimini must copy software EACH time it provides an approved Oracle patch
  to a licensed Oracle customer, and it can't cache the patches for use on multiple
  licensed customers. (or at least pretend to do so).

  --
  No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+2
  Informative=2, Total=2
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		4

• Re:re Terms (Score: 4, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:17PM

  by stormreaver (5101) on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:17PM (#621140)

  So Rimini must copy software EACH time it provides an approved Oracle patch
  to a licensed Oracle customer, and it can't cache the patches for use on multiple
  licensed customers. (or at least pretend to do so).

  That's one of many reasons my company dropped Oracle and moved to PostgreSQL, which I had been using for many year prior to that. I had actually snuck it into production when nobody was looking, and no one noticed a thing. Then, years later, Management audited our software license usage, which was when I told them about PostgreSQL. Several years after that, Oracle pulled one too many evil stunts, and we booted the whole lot of them.

  It's been database nirvana ever since.

  Parent