Violating a Website's Terms of Service Is Not a Crime, Federal Court Rules (eff.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF's advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle's website in a manner it didn't like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website's terms of use is not a crime under the federal computer crime statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But some companies, like Oracle, turned to state computer crime statutes -- in this case, California and Nevada -- to enforce their computer use preferences. This decision shores up the good precedent from 2012 and makes clear -- if it wasn't clear already -- that violating a corporate computer use policy is not a crime.

Comments

UA

[bugs2squash]

I think I might put "I do not accept the terms of your user agreement" somewhere in the User Agent String of my browser, see what happens.

Re:UA

[Bert64]

But where do you see the terms of the agreement before you've accessed the webserver?

Also if they have publicly advertised the website anywhere, could that not be taken as authorisation?

Re:Oracle is such a piece of shit...

[gl4ss]

normal big company(tm)(c) 3rd world story:

make huge dev centers in India and China.
then fire a bunch of developers in country of origin of said company, because they don't have good projects to work on(they didn't before either).

product gets developed in reality by remaining developers in country of origin. the developers in the 3rd world dev centers drink tea and work on some fluff projects. sometime later the 3rd world center gets shuttered for saving money, possibly as the company folds.

nokia did just this for example, ibm did this.

with in case of nokia, the thing is, that they had already way too many developers in the country of origin that they had jack all shit to work on that mattered to the company - making the extra dev centers was purely political and useless(nokia had thousands of people working on symbian, but only 5% of them did anything that went to the products and half of those were subcontractors).

development work does not scale above a certain limit prettily. but big companies can't scale back either so they try to scale up and scaling up in 3rd world countries is cheaper even if it doesn't provide results. note that the problem itself isn't really using 3rd world developers either, it's that you can't just make a product better by hiring thousands of developers - it just makes making the product better vastly more complicated political affair, even when talking about changing few lines of code to add some functionality the executives actually want in.