9th circuit: Visiting a website after being told not to do so is a Federal crime

[Angel Eyes]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/12/9th-circuit-its-a-federal-crime-to-visit-a-website-after-being-told-not-to-visit-it/

Its reasoning appears to be very broad. If I’m reading it correctly, it says that if you tell people not to visit your website, and they do it anyway knowing you disapprove, they’re committing a federal crime of accessing your computer without authorization.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Potential ramifications for APS?

[BobR]

That 9th Circuit is getting more out there with nearly every decision.

Boy who

[French G.]

Just  be an extremely careless web browser. Problems be gone!

[Angel Eyes]

Just  be an extremely careless web browser. Problems be gone!

That only works if your last name is Clinton.

[Devonai]

I read the article, but I'm no expert. It seems to me that the APS analogy here is if I give my user name and password to my buddy, and he uses my account to make a horse's butt out of himself, and gets superultrapermabanned, then either of us create a new account from the IP address(es) that APS can identify,

(deep breath)

Then, Oleg sends a cease-and-desist letter (after cyber-sleuthing the physical address) which the process server verifies receipt. Then either of us creates a new account from a new IP and continues to make a horse's butt out of ourselves, then in the 9th Circuit Oleg can ask for charges to be pressed...

Is that accurate?

[Fly320s]

That's how I read it.  Sounds like the internet version of trespassing.

[MechAg94]

It wasn't clear until I read it.  If you authorize a 3rd party data miner to go into your accounts at another website and the website bans the data miner who then continues to get around it and go back to the site, the data miner can be found guilty.  Says it was some sort of anti-spam law.  I don't know.

I guess the anarchy of the internet is going away.

[cordex]

This sounds like it could have been covered under the existing concept of Trespass to Chattels.  There was a very similar case in California way back in 2000 when eBay sued Bidder's Edge for scraping its site.

[MechAg94]

Facebook doesn't want other people data mining its website.  They are the only ones allowed to do that.

[Ben]

When I heard about this, the example was Netflix and that giving your account info to someone else to login to their site could be a felony. I thought it was about loss of revenue, but I guess it's a much broader ruling?

[cordex]

When I heard about this, the example was Netflix and that giving your account info to someone else to login to their site could be a felony. I thought it was about loss of revenue, but I guess it's a much broader ruling?

I think that was a separate case. As I recall it had to do with a former employee using a current employee's credentials to access an internal company database, but the ruling may have been interpreted more broadly.