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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."
mod parent up.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
Making laws that affect millions of people need on ONE sensationalist case is how you end up with really bad law. Sometimes, breaking into a computer system and stealing stuff, and crashing the system, SHOULD be crime. That's true even if the breaking in could be called a violation of a TOS.
The case that inspired this is mostly fictional, too. It didn't go down the way the activists like to pretend. 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 activists like to point out that he worked for "the university". Yeah, he worked at HARVARD and illegally went into MIT's building and tapped into their network with surreptitious equipment hidden in their network closet.
Also keep in mind, he was never convicted of anything. This "victim of the legal system" never spent one day in jail. He could have presented his case to a jury, but apparently he thought that all 12 members of a jury would unanimously agree that his conduct deserved a felony conviction after they heard the facts. The fact that he didn't expect that at least one of the twelve would side with him shows he had a guilty conscience. The prosecutor was asking for six months minimum security. His lawyer woulda have said probation or suspended sentence and he would have gotten off with some probation or a fine. New laws based on this case just aren't needed. He showed that he knew he was guilty, so the probation he would have received was deserved.