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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

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday January 12 2018, @02:12PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 12 2018, @02:12PM (#621375) Journal

    Now then, since you read my Terms of Service, and took the indicated action to signal your consent, and received consideration, we have a binding contract.

    For the dense of sense, an explanation: This is sarcasm to illustrate a salient point. If you are proposing some argument along the lines of "there is a contract," you are not only completely wrong, but this absurd example is a natural extension of your complete wrongness.

    You can't simply say "If you do what you were doing anyway, I unilaterally force on you some terms." Fortunately, neither the universe nor criminal nor civil law work that way. It would be stupid if they did.

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