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.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday January 12 2018, @02:43PM
Well, violating some parts of a policy isn't a crime, violating other parts may or may not be.
I maintain a website that publishes results and analysis of lottery drawings, containing the results of every drawing of the "Powerball" and "Mega Millions" lotteries held in the United States, dating back to when they began. New results are available within a few hours of each drawing, sometimes faster than the member state lotteries publish them.
Quoting from that site's Terms and Conditions [thelotterystation.com]:
Now, it's probably not (necessarily) illegal to use a bot to scrape the site content. (Unless your bot usage effectively constitutes a Denial of Service attack or some such.) This just clears up that that's a no-no and if you do it, you're doing it against the site's terms and don't count on us to go along with it (we might start an arms race to block bots, or what have you.)
But the prohibition on republishing the site's database of results and analysis without permission is not so clearly legal.