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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.
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.
Nullius in verba
First, this is a civil case rather than a criminal one. Laws like the CFAA and the equivalent state laws allow for criminal and civil action. More importantly, the ruling is a narrow one, focused on the specific aspects of this case. The court ruled that Oracle made the data available for downloading from their website. Oracle's objection was the use of automated tools to download the data. The court agreed that Remini violated the terms of service in how they downloaded the data. However, because Remini was authorized to access and download the data, the court ruled that it did not violated the law. It is entirely possible that someone violations of the terms of service might also violate the law. The ruling is logical, but the scope is also narrower than is indicated by the summary.
While claiming that an username violates the DMCA is an absurd claim, that's not relevant to this ruling. Websites are free to terminate your access for violating the terms of service. The court ruled that it's not against the law to use an automated download tool to access data when the terms of service prohibited automated downloading tools. It still violates the terms of service and Oracle was allowed to terminate access to their site. The court rejected that Oracle could claim damages under state laws for using an automated downloading tool in violation of the terms. Unless anyone has sued you to claim damages under state computer abuse laws for your Slashdot accounts, this is irrelevant.
Once you’ve used Oracle they got you. If you try to leave, you can’t. If you stay, they’ll screw you more and more everyday. Best thing is not never start using Oracle.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You probably can do a good product with third world developers if you seek the really skillful ones, but i don't think that companies going to the third world do have skill as any sort of priority.
While that’s true in theory, I’ve only seen it happen if you keep a really keen eye on those developers. Implement more QA/QC than you normally. The problems with good 3rd world developers there are not a lot of them, they’re not that cheap and they don’t generally want to rewrite or debug their code.
No, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a criminal act, and rejecting the notion that violating a website EULA is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is to say it's not a crime.
So headline is spot on: "Violating a Website's Terms of Service Is Not a Crime, Federal Court Rules"
" It is entirely possible that someone violations of the terms of service might also violate the law."
If they violated the law, violating the EULA or not is irrelevant. It comes down to "do you have the right to access the website" yes/no. Not "are you accessing it within the terms of the EULA".
So yeh, hacking into a private website might be a crime, and it might also violate or not the EULA, but the EULA doesn't define the crime, the law does.
Contracts are weird things.
Agreements very often made with intentionally confusing terms, which are simultaneously:
1) Virtually always signed without actually reading in their full meaning, but rather verbally summarized by a biased beneficiary of the contract - and usually not even that. Indeed, the very idea of reading a contract is almost a faux pas, and is only tolerated with a raised eyebrow.
2) Somehow also considered an almost sacred agreement that must be upheld at great cost - often more important than most forms of important morality or personal needs. Breaking a contract is a completely valid reason to shun a person, or do things to them that would be considered ruining their life.
Indeed - much of the law is considered to be a loose substitute for contract logic, rather than the other way around.
To me, as a programmer, this entire set of logic is absurd. And I've worked extensively with lawyers, and other notable rule-keeping organizations - the way people allow contracts to act as if they were a genie's wish, when they are such sloppy, crude documents, masked behind vague catch-all phrases, in virtually all cases just gives me pause whenever I look into them.
Contracts are a very poor way of reaching an agreement, though I can see how they're the best folks know how to use in general.
The odd thing is how folks tend to be cynical about statistics and accounting - but then accept contracts as if they were a real assurance that someone is willing to truly work with them.
It's also what bothers be about libertarian idealism - the thought of governance as a system replaced with a hyper-religious use of contracts. Like economics, contracts only mean what they say, as long as the system can't be stretched by a group to hold values that said group wants to force them to hold after the fact.
The value of contracts flows, the same as currencies - the same as relationships.
The problems with good 3rd world developers there are not a lot of them, they’re not that cheap and they don’t generally want to rewrite or debug their code.
Quality costs now matter where you go. The cheap guys can always move on to another cheap contract if you hassle them too much and since you don't really know who they are and could be doing business under a different name one day to the next or even one contract to the next, complaining is useless. Dealing with Indian developers is a fitting punishment for PHBs who are cheap and stupid. They deserve each other, liars and cheaters both of them.
they’re not that cheap and they don’t generally want to rewrite or debug their code.
i.e. useless.
It seems two things are at play here: the fact that a EULA cannot limit the publicly or contractually available Information.
The other thing reading further into the case is the fact that Oracle seems to argue that it's copyright does not permit any third parties to obtain any part of the closed source system and the courts agreed with that. The court also holds that any modifications to closed source software are illegal unless you hold an explicit license.
So let's say you are a company and want maintenance work done on your Oracle system, the third party cannot download copies of eg software updates for you because the license does not include that third party.
This should be a big warning for anyone using Windows and other closed source software, the software license does not extend to anyone else therefore even just downloading the patches could get you into copyright infringement.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well Oracle and Cisco are basically pure evil.
Even if Oracle was in the right, Website TOS should never be legally enforced beyond simple authentication. If a site makes no effort to prevent unauthorized access/data scrapes, then every thing on the site is considered public and free to access (not redistribute.)
Oracle used to advertise they could run on a large list of OS's. In practice, they either never bothered to tune many ports: got it running just good enough to not crash (too often), and/or were many versions behind on less-used OS's. They're master spinners.
Table-ized A.I.
If its a Public available site as anyone can load up the site and see then it should be same as walking down side walk and looking in to a store window. If oracle wants they could ban and block the companies bot from accessing their site, they would be allowed to do that but it would be like a store saying you can walk on public side walk OUTSIDE their store least that is what Oracle is trying to make case on.
That sounds like a variation on Brook's Law - adding more people to a late project makes it later.
...will be relived that they're starting to reign in that act. Somebody go back in time and call off the suicide - he would have only had to spend a few years, not what he was sentenced.
If its public yea, as courts have ruled "you have no expectation of privacy in public" same thing.
Add to that "Lay x% of developers in country of origin off every quarter for "performance reasons" relative to the rest of their team, even if they're more productive than the rest of the company. Team spends time "competing" rather than producing.
Watch executive bonuses soar, and actual GOOD developers run to the fucking hills.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I have no other way to describe it when a company thinks that any TOS or EULA it has written is law.
There is a process true laws must go through before becoming valid. They might want to refamiliarize themselves with that concept.
Hell, they can just go watch the episode of School House Rock for the simple version.
Sings: I'm just a bill. . .
I think I'm not planning to follow that link to find out what's there.
Also have to wonder about "fellow yank" in a thread titled "Happy Australia Day." Does not lull suspicion.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.