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Twitch Brings CFAA and Trademark Claim Against Bot Operators (techdirt.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: I think most people agree that bots that drive up viewer/follower counts on various social media systems are certainly a nuisance, but are they illegal? Amazon-owned Twitch has decided to find out. On Friday, the company filed a lawsuit against seven individuals/organizations that are in the business of selling bots. Twitch's lawsuit uses a CFAA claim and a trademark claim. The CFAA is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was put in place in the 1980s in response to the movie War Games and is supposed to be used to punish "hackers" who break into secure computer systems. Techdirt reports: "It's a pretty big stretch to argue that bots accessing your open website that anyone can visit requires some kind of specific "authorization." Yes, cheating bots are annoying. And yes, they can be seen as a problem. But that doesn't mean that Twitch should be trying to expand the definition of the CFAA to include accessing an open website in a way the site doesn't like. The trademark claim is also somewhat troubling, though not as much. No one is visiting the sites of these bot makers and assuming that they're endorsed by Twitch. I mean, they're all pretty clear that their entire purpose is to inflate viewers/followers on Twitch, which is clearly something that Twitch is against. Twitch doesn't need to use either of these claims, and it's disappointing that they and their lawyers have chosen to do so. This is not to say that bots and fake followers are okay. But these kinds of cases can set really bad precedents when a company like Twitch decides to over-claim things in a way that harms the wider tech and internet industry."
sequence of button presses that triggered a bug has been used in under the CFAA.
Hell the cops can use the CFAA with speeding you where not authorized to go past that camera at faster then 55MPH so it's unauthorized access.
At first I assumed these were chatbots, but it sounds like the complaint is really about bots acting as fake viewers? If so, that does sound like conspiracy to commit fraud as opposed to something innocuous.
I know Slashdot isn't journalism, but that much subjective judgment of the situation doesn't belong in the story.
Perhaps Twitch should configure the servers to enforce the TOS then. I've been programming for over 20 years, and I have never "blamed" a client for making my server processes do something that I did not intend.
If someone wants to pretend to have friends/fans by spending money, why is that something we need to stop?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
CFAA(and the california specific variant) and trademark claims are only 3 of the 9 Claims cited. Fruad, Unfair Competition (X2), Breach of Contract, and Tortuitous Interference with contract, and anti-cyber-squating are also cited as claims.
Or they could just apply contract law.
'"Yes, cheating bots are annoying. And yes, they can be seen as a problem."
Can you write a worse, more confusing, AND grammatically incorrect summary?'
You are wrong. The sentence structure may be muddled, but the grammar is quite correct.
They made a law because of a fucking MOVIE???
What kind of idiots are running this country?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are you offering Twitch an unbeatable algorithm that's going to detect the difference between a bot and a person, with no false positives?
Or do the bots log in to an account, against the conditions of using that account?
You mean this this bit they have under "Prohibited Conduct"
use any robot, spider, scraper, crawler or other automated means to access the Twitch Service for any purpose or bypass any measures Twitch may use to prevent or restrict access to the Twitch Service;
Not to outright criminalize them, but certainly to make it a civil offense to hire people to lie for you. There are plenty of misinformed idiots already, paying people to make them into mobs should be discouraged.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
[CFAA] is supposed to be used to punish "hackers" who break into secure computer systems.
If they were "secure systems", then no one could break in, could they?
Therefore they are actually breaking into insecure systems.
No problem here, as you do not need to accept the tos to watch a stream.
you do not need to accept any tos to watch.
Did you click somewhere "i agree"? No? Than you're not bound by anything, which isn't a law.
Did you? Now it's open to legal interpretation, if agreeing to tos without having a contract (which means you're providing some personal details, like at least a verified e-mail address or something similiar) has a meaning.
And then the question is, what's the worst the company can do? Try to go to court "We really logged, that he clicked that button!!!"? The most important part of normal ToS is, that companies can terminate your account. They do not need to sue, because they can terminate your account and are sure you cannot sue them because of this.
When they now want to sue anonymous visitors ... have a lot of fun.