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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   Printer-friendly
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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:48PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:48PM (#621157)

    It doesn't matter what your website does.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Justin Case on Thursday January 11 2018, @11:06PM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Thursday January 11 2018, @11:06PM (#621165) Journal

    It doesn't matter what your website does.

    Yeah, that's the point I'm trying to illustrate: it doesn't matter how many lawyer-words you pile on a website saying "you agree if you do this", it is still possible the visitor didn't agree.

    When you hit reload to interact with your local software, you invoked this clause: "by directing your client software to fetch this text". Your local software then conveyed your interaction to the website; your agent, at your direction and acting on your behalf, interacted with the page containing my Terms of Service.

    You can't just unilaterally declare "by interacting" (or by any other thing) "you agree", because I do not agree with that declaration, therefore I don't agree that by doing $WHATEVER I became bound by your words.