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Internet Access and Computer Fraud Laws

Posted by michael on from the rated-p-for-parole-in-12-14-years dept.

DrJimbo writes "Groklaw has an explanatory article covering the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in layman's terms. The article discusses legal precedents that might make it illegal to access much of the internet. The article is a response to a claim by SCO that IBM violated the CFAA by downloading GPL'ed software from SCO's public HTTP and FTP sites."

7 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Dear Groklaw, by Neil+Blender · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    YHBT. HAND.

  2. I'm new to slashdot... by JossiRossi · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    ...so do I actually have to read the article to comment on it? Oh man, irony... humor of gods.

    --
    Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
  3. I Give Up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Slashdot has become terrible. Between the lame stories, dupes and having to hit refresh 300 times just to get the page to render, I give up.

    Anybody have a good replacement for Slashdot?

  4. Chinee Illegality outside of the USA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    American laws which purport to illegalize behavior on the Internet have a major loophole: most of the Internet is outside of the USA. Most spam, viruses, and malware originate in China, so do most advertisements for human trafficking (e.g. sex slaves).

    If a Chinese thug sells, on an Internet web page, a Chinese child for indentured servitude, what can American law enforcement do?

    Maybe extrajudicial vigilantism has a role here. Americans go to Taiwan and kill the Chinese thug selling children on the Internet.

  5. Newspaper classified ads... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    In other news...

    The "Little Disme" want-ads has been named in a lawsuit for buying various newspapers, scanning and OCR'ing their classified ads, and publishing those classified ads in the "Little Disme" publications, albeit by changing any phone numbers to instead call into a mailbox system that would then disclose the real phone number to call, after agreeing that the caller, if they buy any product...blah blah blah.

    It sounds like the one company has a bit of a case, because if they had CD's with their original company's customer lists, pricing information, etc., and used that at their new company, that would be information theft (nothing to do with copyright here).

    This isn't the only place that this happens. In the real world, pricing managers for most retail stores keep well-abrest of their competitors published prices (and will go into those stores to check those prices out as well, perceived quantities on hand, etc., things a competent spy would do), etc. They do this so they can gauge how much they're risking with their price-match policies.

    So the original company is trying to use copyright to fight this. Perhaps it's valid, if the original company's prices were published without attribution regarding their source, but it's hard to call it a threat to the internet, because it is a practice that is only different because it's so easy to automate.

    Perhaps the original company should have been smarter, by putting their prices behind a "click-through" page with a user agreement which says that the published prices are for individual customer/consumer use only, blah blah blah, and that any other use is in violation of this agreement, and we will come steal your Aeron chairs and post-it notes in retaliation.

    But they didn't.

  6. In the name of God! by Lord+Kano · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Can we please get a new Unabomber already. SCO seems a ripe target to me.

    LK

    --
    "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
  7. Re:Illegal to access much of the internet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Do WHAT with a football?!?

    I believe that even the goatse guy would need to apply large quantities of lubrication.