Suit To Let Researchers Break Website Rules Wins a Round (axios.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Anyone following Facebook's recent woes with Cambridge Analytica might be surprised to hear that there's a civil liberties argument for swiping data from websites, even while violating their terms of service. In fact, there's a whole world of situations where that thinking could apply: bona fide academic research. On Friday, a judge in a D.C. federal court ruled that an American Civil Liberties Union-backed case trying to guarantee researchers the ability to break sites' rules without being arrested could move forward, denying a federal motion to dismiss. "What we're talking about here is research in the public interest, finding out if there is discrimination," Esha Bhandari, an ACLU attorney representing the academics, told Axios.

Comments

To clarify:

[Anonymous Coward]

This suit is over whether breaking a site's TOS consittutes a criminal offense under the CFAA, notably 18 USC 1030(a)(4-6).

There is a circuit split on this issue, which this suit attempts to clarify.

This suit does not have any impact on civil or contractual suits researches might face for breaking TOS, only whether doing so is a federal criminal offense under this specific law.