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EFF: Accessing Publicly Available Information On the Internet Is Not a Crime (eff.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from EFF: EFF is fighting another attempt by a giant corporation to take advantage of our poorly drafted federal computer crime statute for commercial advantage -- without any regard for the impact on the rest of us. This time the culprit is LinkedIn. The social networking giant wants violations of its corporate policy against using automated scripts to access public information on its website to count as felony "hacking" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to criminalize breaking into private computer systems to access non-public information.
EFF, together with our friends DuckDuckGo and the Internet Archive, have urged the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reject LinkedIn's request to transform the CFAA from a law meant to target "hacking" into a tool for enforcing its computer use policies. Using automated scripts to access publicly available data is not "hacking," and neither is violating a website's terms of use. LinkedIn would have the court believe that all "bots" are bad, but they're actually a common and necessary part of the Internet. "Good bots" were responsible for 23 percent of Web traffic in 2016. Using them to access publicly available information on the open Internet should not be punishable by years in federal prison. LinkedIn's position would undermine open access to information online, a hallmark of today's Internet, and threaten socially valuable bots that journalists, researchers, and Internet users around the world rely on every day -- all in the name of preserving LinkedIn's advantage over a competing service. The Ninth Circuit should make sure that doesn't happen.
EFF, together with our friends DuckDuckGo and the Internet Archive, have urged the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reject LinkedIn's request to transform the CFAA from a law meant to target "hacking" into a tool for enforcing its computer use policies. Using automated scripts to access publicly available data is not "hacking," and neither is violating a website's terms of use. LinkedIn would have the court believe that all "bots" are bad, but they're actually a common and necessary part of the Internet. "Good bots" were responsible for 23 percent of Web traffic in 2016. Using them to access publicly available information on the open Internet should not be punishable by years in federal prison. LinkedIn's position would undermine open access to information online, a hallmark of today's Internet, and threaten socially valuable bots that journalists, researchers, and Internet users around the world rely on every day -- all in the name of preserving LinkedIn's advantage over a competing service. The Ninth Circuit should make sure that doesn't happen.
If:
I can send a simple http request to your server, and
Your server sends me the information without doing its homework, then
Sucks to be you.
Don't want your information to be scraped? Have it behind a login - free or otherwise - then ban accounts that are slurping down 10,000 pages a day.
Ohhhhh then it wouldn't be easily indexed by search engines and thus findable by the general public and your site would fade into obscurity. What to do!? Courts to the rescue, it seems!
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Let's use a different example. Arrest records and mugshots on police agencies' websites. Let's say Jane Doe, born 1/1/1970 got arrested for a particularly heinous crime. Murder, or robbery at gunpoint.
Six months later, a court ruled her not guilty. She was able to petition to have the public arrest record on the Yoknapatawpha County Sheriff's office website deleted.
However, in the interim, it's been scraped and archived by database companies using the data for employer background checks. Every time she applies for a job with a large employer, her application either gets round-filed, or she has a lot of explaining to do.
What's worse, in the state of Winnemac, there are six Jane Does with that same birthday, all of which have the same record in their background check database...
Does information still want to be free?