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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:Enforce your own rules, Oracle (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Thursday January 11 2018, @09:44PM

  by frojack (1554) on Thursday January 11 2018, @09:44PM (#621115) Journal

  Is the court saying you must treat all clients equally? Or merely that you can't use the courts to do things you neglected to do in your web server config?

  I think its the latter. The courts do not concern themselves with trivialities. De Minimis Non Curat Lex [duhaime.org] and are not about to get involved with evaluating 7 billion versions of terms of service and alleged violations there of.

  Its not law, its not even contract law, its just wishful thinking of websites.

  This was never an issue until ad-blockers became a thing. (Yes people got turfed for bad behavior on some sites, but nobody won that court case either. And the court now said the sites aren't going to win when going after their patrons.

  But bear in mind, that this is the 9th. And the with a 79% reversal rate, there's no reason to believe this will stand. Big business depends on the ability to enforce some rules on their sites and some transgressions by users approach injury to revenue. So expect an appeal. The ruling is probably too broad and Oracle has the money and lawyers to burn.

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

  Parent

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