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Aaron's Law: Violating a Site's ToS Should Not Land You in Jail
Freddybear writes "Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren proposes a change to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) which would remove the felony criminal penalty for violating the terms of service of a website and return it to the realm of contract law where it belongs. This would eliminate the potential for prosecutors to abuse the CFAA in pursuit of criminal convictions for simple violations of a website's terms of service."
If the violation of ToS is due to an illegal action like posting things that are illegal both for the location of the site and the poster it should still land into the legal system, but the large volume of ToS violations should at most render the offender a permanent banning from that site or in milder cases a temporary ban.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
no the power will get to who ever is in the chair and turn them into an a-hole. power corrupts.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
While I think this is a good idea, I think that it's really too superficial. It very narrowly addresses a very specific problem with the law.
There are two really great little tidbits I found online that talk about what the actual problems with the law are:
The first link is actually a really great series that provides a very nice explanation for a lot of things about how criminal law works.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
It is high time we rollback the number of crimes that result in felony convictions. The "Get Tough On Crime" era only resulted in overstretched state budgets and the creation of an entire underclass of citizens who are barred from certain employments, voting, etc. just because politicians sought to score political points in order to get re-elected. There is a very stark contrast to what the term "felon" implies with regards to the seriousness or violence of the crime, and the rather lackadaisical manner in which it is applied in the legal context.
Fantastic fucking idea. You know what would have made it better? If it never was a felony to begin with.
Don't mod this up. Common sense doesn't need moderation points. I'm venting.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
You must secretly be an asshole, waiting for your day to shine. Power attracts certain dysfunctional personality types. It's not that good people are so rare but it is so rare that good people find themselves in powerful positions.
CFAA needs to be repealed for being too broad.
ToS violations were already ruled legal in U.S. vs Drew
Aren't violations of contracts (like ToS) subject to civil law instead of criminal law?
Vision with execution is hallucination.
I have a document in my backpack; my personal ToS. It states that everyone who shakes my hand must give me $20. By shaking, they agree.
Fails. Firstly other party is unaware of the terms prior to the hand shake and as you will remember from 1st year law school, past consideration is no consideration. Even if they were it still fails for lack of consideration: the other party suffers a detriment both in paying $20 and in shaking your hand, so the consideration only flows in the same direction ... twice. :p
Ever notice how technical problems HAVE to be fixed? or else? How sportsmen are banned for life? This never happens to people who commit fraud in finance (or create financial instruments that simply suck money from us) or those who frame laws that are faulty! The real world is ruled by the powerful and logic does not apply.
Leave the damn guy alone.
This might be a good law, but don't reward suicide by naming it Aaron's law. Troubled fools will be offing themselves left and right for their favorite causes.
It still would be a useful reform. Remember that woman who 'trolled' a teenager into killing herself? She was almost prosecuted for violating the MySpace TOS, which would have been a terrible precedent, as it would make trolling actually illegal.
I'd probably draw a distinction between when money changes hands relating to TOS-violations, and otherwise. There need to be tools to fight botters, for example.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
You can get more time for breaking a ToS than for...
- Manslaughter
- Robbing a bank
- Child porn with intent to distribute
among other things. Pathetic.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/01/14/1441211/killers-slavers-and-bank-robbers-all-face-less-severe-prison-terms-than-aaron-swartz-did/
That is difficult to fix because senior prosecutors use their position to run for office or become a judge while junior prosecutors use their position to become senior prosecutors. Both of these require making a name for yourself. And there are no penalties for overcharging and intimidating defendants because the prosecutor can simply claim that they were following the law and that their plea bargains are reasonable (so reasonable that even innocent people commonly take them /sarc). Congress isn't going to change the laws because they are owned by the corporations. So the public is fucked. Nothing short of a revolution is going to fix this, and even then I am highly skeptical. The rich will loot the system, the politically connected will get away with high crimes (like HSBC and every other bank), and the common man will continue to get shafted. But at least with a revolution, we can occasionally put some of these fuckers against the wall.
Sorry but the sheer mechanics of what your proposing totally and utterly mind boggling.
I'm pretty sure no matter how good the prosecutor is, his/her's a sphincter is actually going to occupy that chair. Then you're proposing that people who do sit in a particular chair should be thrown in jail?
Lunacy! but not so far fetched considering what the US Govt. did to Swartz.
You must secretly be an asshole, waiting for your day to shine. Power attracts certain dysfunctional personality types. It's not that good people are so rare but it is so rare that good people find themselves in powerful positions.
This is the most unfortunate problem inherent in any democratic system. The rule of the petty tyrants.
1) Your navigation to this website is considered agreement to the following terms
2) You shall not view, consider or think about this website
3) Breach of these conditions will result in all your base belong to us.
Think that if you violate a TOS you should land in jail it only makes sense.
--
Note: by reading this comment you agree to pay me a fee of $1,000,000 if the fee is refused I reserve the right to throw you in jail.
Yes, the law is supposed to distinguish between a non-criminal civil dispute between two private parties (Aaron and JSTOR) and a crime which is "an act so horrendous it is against society" - I am paraphrasing a law professor. Aaron's acts don't come close to that. Yet there he was looking at prison.
ArsTechnica has a good article on this case, which quotes Columbia law professor Tim Wu on the appalling behavior of federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz:
In our age, armed with laws passed in the nineteen-eighties and meant for serious criminals, the federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz approved a felony indictment that originally demanded up to thirty-five years in prison. Worse still, her legal authority to take down Swartz was shaky. Just last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar prosecution. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a prominent conservative, refused to read the law in a way that would make a criminal of “everyone who uses a computer in violation of computer use restrictions—which may well include everyone who uses a computer.” Ortiz and her lawyers relied on that reading to target one of our best and brightest... The prosecutors forgot that, as public officials, their job isn’t to try and win at all costs but to use the awesome power of criminal law to protect the public from actual harm... Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/opening-arguments-in-the-trial-of-public-opinion-after-aaron-swartz-death
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-a-felon.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/17/silverglate-three-felonies-book
Academic publishers have been price gauging universities and students for a long time, but to their credit at least JSTOR had the brains to tell the feds to back off. Oritz should have listened to them. Their behavior is merely greedy. Hers is unforgivable: there is no place in government for public officials who abuse their power and harm the public for their own personal advantage.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices
http://enculturation.gmu.edu/knowledge-cartels
http://boingboing.net/2010/01/03/prescription-for-con.html
http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2012/ending-knowledge-cartels/
Which is why the scope of democratic authority needs to be limited, so that megalomaniac nutcases must needs look elsewhere for their control fix.
Changing mac and ip addresses for the purpose of evading a ban is much closer to the sort of trespass the CFAA was designed to prevent than mere tos violations.
It's like a bar.
You can get 86'ed any time by the bartender but that's the worst they can do.
Go back and it's trespassing
Yes, it would have been a terrible precedent to use that law for that purpose, but the fact she escaped any legal responsibility for her predatory behavior is also a terrible precedent. From my POV the US justice system failed to deliver justice in both cases.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
All the more reason to never allow infringement of your right to bear arms.
I have a document in my backpack; my personal ToS. It states that everyone who shakes my hand must give me $20. By shaking, they agree.
Even if they were it still fails for lack of consideration: the other party suffers a detriment both in paying $20 and in shaking your hand, so the consideration only flows in the same direction ... twice. :p
Easy fix: switch the places between the hand and the ToS... put the hand in the backpack (detach it if necessary) and offer the ToS to be shaken.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Well what a happy bouncy chirpy kind of guy you are. You would probably look at six months jail as a chance to win six months of free rent, food and medical care. Courts are very stressful places. You've obviously never been before one. Don't sit on your high horse and tell us how wonderful and fair they are, because you don't know shit.
I have a document in my backpack; my personal ToS. It states that everyone who shakes my hand must give me $20. By shaking, they agree.
Fails. Firstly other party is unaware of the terms prior to the hand shake and as you will remember from 1st year law school, past consideration is no consideration. Even if they were it still fails for lack of consideration: the other party suffers a detriment both in paying $20 and in shaking your hand, so the consideration only flows in the same direction ... twice. :p
I believe that is how most TOS and EULA's seem to work anyway.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You must secretly be an asshole, waiting for your day to shine. Power attracts certain dysfunctional personality types. It's not that good people are so rare but it is so rare that good people find themselves in powerful positions.
This is the most unfortunate problem inherent in any democratic system. The rule of the petty tyrants.
And it's easy to understand why: good people find better use for their time than power games.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I agree that there are way too many "laws".
It's just unfortunate that in this case this particular "law" cost the life of a very promising young guy.
The damn system did him in.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The Terms of Service are a contract. For breach of a contract you are entitled to economic damages*. You are not entitled to throw the other party in jail. Only the government can imprison people and only when the breach is criminal. See post below.
*JSTOR could have sued him for lost earnings or copyright, but chose not to.
And this slashdot post is the start of it! Go! Go! Go!
That is some serious bullshit there. The "guilty conscience" thing? Seriously, that's just crap. That is not how people work, and that is not how reality works. There are lots of people who know perfectly well that there is a law they have technically broken, but who do not feel guilty about it at all -- but who might not be surprised to face jail time if a prosecutor happened to pick them to make an example of. The problem with this, apart from the victim-blaming, is that you're assuming that "violated a law" and "guilty" are the same thing in any kind of ethical sense. Similarly, "he knew he was guilty, so the probation he would have recieved was deserved."
This doesn't logically follow, because "deserve" is a moral claim, but you're basing it on the legal system. Legal systems are not moral systems. You can quite easily be fully aware that you have done a thing which is prohibited by a law, but not feel that you deserve jail time for it. Or you might feel that a misdemeanor charge that's in some way related to what you did is justified, but that multiple felony counts aren't.
The fact is, nothing he did merits years of jail time, and the claim that the prosecutor was "asking for" six months minimum security is highly misleading at best. They were, quite clearly, aiming to make an example of him. Look at previous cases Ortiz prosecuted against people who could afford defense teams, and tell me how "deserved" those outcomes were.
Long story short, even if we ignore the fact that he was depressed, this was a crazy thing and your attempts to make it look less crazy are disturbing. The just world fallacy is called a fallacy because it is not actually valid reasoning. Your attempts to make yourself feel okay with the world by pretending that what happens is okay and justified are unpersuasive at best. And yet. We know he was depressed, and we know a fair amount about what depression does to people's ability to evaluate things and make decisions. It's bad enough that prosecutors are trying really hard to make dramatic examples of people by going after huge piles of charges without regard to the actual severity of the underlying acts; cherry-picking for depressed people because they're easier to bully is despicable. So's trying to defend it.
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If the violation amounts to large scale theft, it must be treated as a serious criminal matter.
The guy was a felon
No he was an alleged felon. He had not been convicted of any of the crimes he allegedly committed.
But then since you're posting anonymously, you don't appear to me to be prepared to stand behind the statement you made.
Yes. But the illegality of that action is completely independent from the site's ToS. ToS just do not belong in criminal law. In fact they are there almost nowhere else in the world.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Wrong.
Courts have upheld the ToS/EULA contained within a shrink-wrapped bundle in a way unreadable from the outside that states that by opening this bundle you agree to the contents and forfeit any rights to return the merchandise except where covered by warranty. Microsoft used these for a decade.
The correct way to handle the Microsoft EULA was to not open it and by other means access their website, read the EULA there and then you'd still have the option to return everything. Later they simply packaged their EULA in a separate loose pamphlet and only shrink wrap software and manuals.
Actually, most ToS are also 'impossible' - they usually state "...by accessing this site you agree to..." but you need to access the site in order to read that. which means that simply by reading the ToS you agree to them.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
In other words: The chair fills the asshole...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Well let's just stop prosecuting criminals at all then, since some of them might be sensitive flowers that just can't handle facing consequences from their deliberate actions.
U.S. prisons are notoriously shitty, but you can't use that as an excuse that no one should serve a sentence for any kind of time. Half a year of prison is not an extraordinary sentence.
I have a document in my backpack; my personal ToS. It states that everyone who shakes my hand must give me $20. By shaking, they agree.
Fails. Firstly other party is unaware of the terms prior to the hand shake and as you will remember from 1st year law school, past consideration is no consideration. Even if they were it still fails for lack of consideration: the other party suffers a detriment both in paying $20 and in shaking your hand, so the consideration only flows in the same direction ... twice. :p
So put the TOS document in shrinkwrap, then it should be binding.
This space unintentionally left blank.
I'd settle for having somebody constantly watching over them... "Sure you want to do that? Looks like an asshole move to me!"
They could have a quota for identifying a minimum number of asshole prosecutors, and their career progression could depend on declaring powerful people to be assholes.
In other words: The chair fills the asshole...
We all have seen some of the more colorful parts of the internet.
Yes, it would have been a terrible precedent to use that law for that purpose, but the fact she escaped any legal responsibility for her predatory behavior is also a terrible precedent. From my POV the US justice system failed to deliver justice in both cases.
I don't know the case, but it sounds like she was only guilty of harassment and the victim was dead.
The fact that the victim committed suicide doesn't change the crime she committed. Anyways, I imagine that harassment is hard to prove, especially with the victim being unable to witness...
I'm not saying what she did was acceptable, nor that it wasn't technically illegal, but that if you have free speech, convicting people of bullying can be very hard... And even when done, the punishment is often insignificant (after all bullying is a minor offence).
There is a case to be made that Aaron didn't even violate TOS. He walked into an unlocked building and entered an unlocked closet and put a laptop in there. His laptop by making lots of requests for journal articles proceeded to DOS the site (effectively slashdotting it). Apparently they were not actually prepared for people to download journal articles (the purpose of the site). Various network admins then got involved to figure out what was going on, and how to slow things down. Somehow that got the feds and the Secret Service involved and there was a nasty over reaction at the end.
Having read the proposed law it seems like a nice patch to the legal code. I don't know that it fixes the whole problem but it makes things better.
Frankly I think what Aaron did was rude behavior and he probably deserved some kind of slap on the wrist so Aaron would realize how rude it was. A felony conviction and lots of jail time seem way over the top.
It is a crime right now?
Seriously?
AFK - I need to add "you agree to only use this site while standing on your head naked at the center of a busy intersection" to my ToS. Burried somewhere in the middle. And then send out anonymous invitations to everyone I dislike...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No law shall be enacted which makes civil offences criminal ones.
THAT would solve a lot of problems with your present justice system.
Prosecutors abuse overbroad laws?!? When did this start happening?
I was assured, ASSURED that they have the best interest of the public at heart.
http://2girls1cup.nl/
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
More likely to see the otherwise ordinarily bullied up against the wall first in revolution.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
The dude downloaded a few files. He should have been locked up forever!!! This is serious stuff. It's not like he KILLED MICHAEL JACKSON or something... then I could see being a bit more lenient... like 4 years in jail or something.
Offering 6 months if you accept guilt and waive your right to a Trial V/s We will get you for 50 years. That's as bad as the mafia asking for protection money - Pay $100 a day OR we'll demolish everything in your shop or break your knees.
So, your law school taught you that the TOS of a web site is not valid. Maybe you should inform this Aaron of that.
Like a bar that bans the guy in the blue shirt. When you come back wearing a red shirt, should you be punished for changing clothes, or should the bar fix their policy of banning clothes?
would you be in favor of this law if it had been proposed out of pure wisdom and legal consideration?
if not, GTFO. seriously. kill yourself.
if so, why does it matter what prompted it?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I'd agree we should repeal the CFAA entirely, ditto PATRIOT Act, etc.
Ideally, one should halt plea bargains entirely as well though, civilized countries forbid that barbaric practice. It's plea bargains that create the need for these insane laws with which prosecutors beat defendants into guilty pleas.
I doubt we'll correct these systemic problems though because the prison-industrial-prosecutorial complex has far too effective a lobby.
I suspect me must demonstrate the capacity to derail the profesional lives of overzealous prosecutors and law enforcement before they'll back off enough for us to fix the underlying laws.
You should sign the petition to fire both Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz of course, especially the one for Heymann who previously drove another accused hacker to suicide.
We must take this well beyond simply firing these two abusive prosecutors though. We should obviously prevent them from ever winning any primary elections or being appointed for other political posts, especially judgeships.
If they lose their jobs, we should then target any private sector law firms that hire them for corporate law. You should not harass said law firms directly of course, but attempting to raise a stink with their clients might work.
If these two powerful prosecutors wind up as lowly defense attorneys, even highly paid ones, then we'll basically have sent a clear message that abusing the CFAA isn't necessarily such an effective way to make a political career for yourself.
There are numerous other people deserving of the same treatment as well, but at present we've no method of organizing it.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Very true. Once you are charged or sued no matter how bogus your life is ruined. Courts can make mistakes and if the federal prosecutor gets a sympathetic judge you can find yourself in jail with no one to listen. She threatened this guy with 35 years jail. How would that make any college kid feel? Even if he won, that is years off his life, the stigma of being charged, jailed and a crushing debt.
Here are some very nasty stories of federal employees like Oritz who made people's lives a misery "because they could": SAN FRANCISCO — A year after this bizarre charge — that she lied about the interaction with the humpback that produced no charges — more than a dozen federal agents, led by one from NOAA, raided her home. They removed her scientific photos, business files and computers. Call this a fishing expedition. This pursuit of Black seems to have become a matter of institutional momentum, an agent-driven case. Six years ago, NOAA agents, who evidently consider the First Amendment a dispensable nuisance, told Black's scientific colleagues not to talk to her and to inform them if they were contacted by her or her lawyers. Since then she has not spoken with one of her best friends.To finance her defense she has cashed out her life's savings, which otherwise might have purchased a bigger boat. The government probably has spent millions. It delivered an administrative subpoena to her accountant, although no charge against her has anything to do with finances. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120803gw.html .
Due diligence exists because the alternative is allowing ignorance of the law to be a defense. And that does NOT WORK. Proof? Patents. IBM advises its people NOT to research patents to see if they might already have been filed or if prior art exists because in patent law, ignorance IS a defense. And it SUCKS!
If you allow ignorance of the law to be a defense, anyone can simply claim of anything at all that they didn't know and get of free. Your turtle soup maker could import turtles from anywhere at all, endangered as hell and simply say "I didn't know" and get away with it. Your idea is totally unworkable UNLESS you are one of those libertarians who think there should be no law in which case I will just book a one way ticket on your credit card to Somalia.
No doubt you think killing of endangered species for soup is all perfectly fine. Of course if I set foot at night on your lawn to ask directions, you are free to gun me down. Laws only are right when they protect you, when they stop you from harming others, they are wrong. Right?
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Oh and it would help if your really bad artist friend actually linked to some real cases, with the FULL story. Not like people talking about the 3 strikes rule and then ONLY mention the last light crime, NOT how the cookie thief was out for one hour after serving 20 years for eating babies before being thrown back in jail to rot.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A larger problem however is the expectation of non-legal laymen to read and agree to what are ostensibly binding TOS contracts.
I have seen TOS contracts that (in non-digital format) would be dozens of pages long. Users simply click "Ok" with the assumption that "There's probably nothing bad in there". But this assumption is clearly false in a large number of cases when one considers privacy and security clauses.
I have seen "Digital trespassing" (which are protected by the DMCA) buried in the TOS carrying agreed monetary damage amounts.
Consider that a TOS could expressly forbid users to use AdBlock and consider all users of AdBlock to be digital trespassers. You say "Bollocks" (as would I, for the record) but that doesn't change the fact that a TOS can say whatever it wants and the law has already decided that online consent to contracts can be binding. (Not to confuse the greater issue with the legality of this one example of course.)
The issue ultimately comes down to:
1) The expectations of lay-people to understand and agree to complex, binding agreements, the vast majority of which are never read.
2) The binding nature of a click-to-sign agreement.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Both.
Clothing bans are a stupid policy.
That said, the bar still has the legal right to ban whoever the fuck they want to for no reason whatsoever. It's their bar and they'll run it as they darn please.
Created a website, breaking the TOS was coming to it, and the penalty was jail for life.
Duh. My whole point was that no one is aware of the ToS.
any trespassing cases based on odd store rules out there??
And let's say there is some whites only rule at one (let just say it's old but is still on the books or say on a sign that may be still up even if it's just for show or history) that can still be used as a part of a Throw the Book at someone in court.
Making laws that affect millions of people need on ONE sensationalist case is how you end up with really bad law
This is not just one bad case. Any of us could be Aaron Swartz. Fewer that 3% of those accused of a federal crime exercise their right to a trial. When was the last time the government was 97% accurate about anything? Ever? We know for a fact that we are imprisoning innocent people who are too afraid to go to trial. That needs to stop.
Aaron didn't just violate a TOS. He physically entered a network closet he shouldn't have been in and hid computer equipment in there that crashed the network, so other people couldn't use it
The bastard, clearly he deserves 35 years in prison for that.
The prosecutor was asking for six months minimum security
If the prosecutor thought 6 months was an appropriate punishment for what he did, she should have charged him with crimes where 6 months was the punishment and taken him to trial on that.
New laws based on this case just aren't needed
The need for new laws existed long before this case. Prosecutorial abuse is rampant in this country and it's time it's addressed.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
changing a IP so rebooting a modem can = lockup?
and MAC addresses most routers can clone macs from any system hooked to them and that dates back to the days of cable systems try to change per IP just like they have that BS outlet fee for each TV.
That is why the laws need to change.
minimum-security prison is no picnic. The trick is: kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be all right.
They better not cry about it when they go out of business, then.
First 30 posts, and nobody has actually realised what the problem is. This law is intended to make it illegal to hack into a computer. Which is fine. Of course I should be allowed to access a computer if I'm authorized. Which also makes sense. Now let's say Apple has their music and the customer accounts on the same computer. I'm authorized to access that computer (to download music), but if I somehow manage to put $100 into my account, that would be hacking which we want to be illegal. Even though I'm allowed to access the computer. So how do we put this into a law? They called it "exceeding my authorisation" and made it illegal.
But now people have been claiming that doing something that is against the TOS is "exceeding my authorisation" and therefore illegal hacking. So if Slashdot's TOS said "you must not swear in any posts", then this post would be a bloody violation of these TOS and equivalent to computer hacking.
A similar situation is this: Some employee has access to a customer list stored on the company's computer. It's part of his job (for example to send spam to customers). He sells the customer list to a competitor. Clearly a bad thing, and clearly in some way illegal. But now it is claimed that accessing the customer list on the computer exceeded his authorisation, so he is a computer hacker. No, he isn't.
Prophetic.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It seemed to be VERY easy to lose you.
Why do you think that is?
Frankly I'd get rid of all contracts of adhesion.
Yes. I would also like a pony.
ABSOLUTE power corrupts, absolutely. That does not mean all levels of power will corrupt. The true measure of a man is what he does with power.
Good-bye
1 having the first N pages be a set of boilerplate definitions (this causes you to go into a MEGO mode before any rules are stated)
Fix: move those to the END of the doc
2 stuff that hacks earlier clauses
Fix: forbid later clauses from changing the nature of earlier clauses UNLESS there is a link/reference
3 Use of nonstandard definitions of things like Week/Month/Year/Unlimited
Fix: Webster overrides anything not "In the Context of the Normal Practice of the Business"
4 EULA/TOS being way to long to read
Fix you get 2 QRcodes (not counting the definitions part) with an allowed extra code for Business Corp and Personal rules
5 Choose Your Own Adventure writing
Fix: require these to be in separate blocks with the Personal (or smallest business) version being the template
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I knew someone would say this. He changed his MAC for purposes of evading IT, that is the crime. Its like being at the mall and being told to leave so you put on a disguise and go back. If you are unmasked, you are getting arrested and charged with trespass.
Good-bye
It happens everyday to many other people. I know many people forced to take plea bargains for DUIs or traffic accidents to avoid excessive jail time. Why is no one making a big deal about them? The US Justice system is not perfect. It has flaws and people should challenge those flaws to improve it. However, hacking and breaching computer system security is still wrong. The US Government has a real obligation to ensure the security of the nation's computer systems. Swartz could have easily promoted his political opinions another way. Breaking the law was his choice.
I'm curious what role or relationship Aaron had with MIT, if any. I've seen no indication of any authorization for Aaron to be in that network closet. This is a serious breach of network security in its own right. Universities deal with some quite sensitive infomation and quite a bit falling under various regulatory schema (PCI, FERPA, HIPAA, &c). The integrity of the network starts with good physical controls. He had a key to the IDF for f's sake. I'm quite suprised MIT did not appear to take this as a serious matter.
I'm also having a bit of trouble lionizing this guy; if your going to take on the 'man' you have to have the balls to do it. This is not a battle for the sensitive.
No one's arguing about breaking the law. We're only worried about the injustice of plea bargaining being used as blackmail by DAs to further their own careers.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reform-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act-reflect-realities-computing-and-networks-2013/qMvdwVNw And it's under the 25k rule for review by the White House. Yes.. they don't lead on legislation, but it's a great place to short support for her bill. Thanks,
Do I think the AUSA in the Distruct of New York was too aggressive. Yes. Facing 30 years in prison, is no joke. Aaron Swartz did more than just violate a TOS. Aaron Swartz allegedly broke into a closet at MIT and tapped into JSTOR.
There has to be a balance between what damage was done, whether the principal, not the agent, wants to push for prosecution and what are the damages. Intellectual property is a very serious business.
I disagree with Zoe Lofgren about 99% of the time, but she's on the right track with this. I would recommend a tiered action, based upon damages. Someone copying and distributing CD's or DVD's illegally should get the 30 years, with a felony conviction. Someone doing illegal downloads? Depending on the quantity of material found, fine the person $10 a song, plus court costs or 30 days of incarceration, for each song or album, up to 100. At 99 cents a download from Amazon, or super cheap CD's and DVD's from EBay, there's no excuse to rip off music or movies.